Fadeout and Persistence of Intervention Impacts on Social-Emotional and Cognitive Skills in Children and Adolescents: A Meta-Analytic Review of Randomized Controlled Trials

• Published in: Psychological bulletin 2024-10, Vol.150 (10), p.1207-1236
• Main Authors: Hart, Emma R., Bailey, Drew H., Luo, Sha, Sengupta, Pritha, Watts, Tyler W.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adolescent; Adolescents; Aspiration; Child; Child Development - physiology; Child, Preschool; Clinical trials; Cognition & reasoning; Cognition - physiology; Cognitive Ability; Cognitive skills; Emotions - physiology; Female; Human; Humans; Infancy; Infant; Intervention; Long term; Male; Meta-analysis; Persistence; Policy making; Posttesting; Randomized Controlled Trials; Randomized Controlled Trials as Topic; Skills; Social Skills; Socioemotional Functioning
• ISSN: 0033-2909; 1939-1455; 1939-1455
• DOI: 10.1037/bul0000450

Researchers and policymakers aspire for educational interventions to change children's long-run developmental trajectories. However, intervention impacts on cognitive and achievement measures commonly fade over time. Less is known, although much is theorized, about social-emotional skill persistence. The current meta-analysis investigated whether intervention impacts on social-emotional skills demonstrated greater persistence than impacts on cognitive skills. We drew studies from eight preexisting meta-analyses, generating a sample of 86 educational randomized controlled trials targeting children from infancy through adolescence, together involving 56,662 participants and 450 outcomes measured at posttest and at least one follow-up. Relying on a metaregression approach for modeling persistence rates, we tested the extent to which posttest impact magnitudes predicted follow-up impact magnitudes. We found that posttest impacts were equally predictive of follow-up impacts for cognitive and social-emotional skills at 6- to 12-month follow-up, indicating similar conditional persistence rates across skill types. At 1- to 2-year follow-up, rates were lower, and, if anything, cognitive skills showed greater conditional persistence than social-emotional skills. A small positive follow-up effect was observed, on average, beyond what was directly predicted by the posttest impact, indicating that interventions may have long-term effects that are not fully mediated by posttest effects. This pattern of results implied that smaller posttest impacts produced more persistent effects than larger posttest impacts, and social-emotional skill impacts were smaller, on average, than cognitive skill impacts. Considered as a whole, intervention impacts on both social-emotional and cognitive skills demonstrated fadeout, especially for interventions that produced larger initial effects. Implications for theory and future directions are discussed. Public Significance Statement This study found that a broad array of educational programs improved child social-emotional and cognitive skills at the program end. However, these improvements faded significantly in the following years. Although boosts to social-emotional skills are expected to persist and lay the foundation for children's future success, this study suggests that initial improvements to cognitive and social-emotional functioning were often short-lived. Although some educational programs produce life-altering benefits in the l