Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Early Education Interventions on Cognitive and Social Development

By Gregory Camilli, Sadako Vargas, Sharon Ryan, W. S. Barnett. Teachers College Record, 2010

836 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Background/Context There is much current interest in the impact of early childhood education programs on preschoolers and, in particular, on the magnitude of cognitive and affective gains. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study Because this new segment of public education may require substantial resources, accurate descriptions are required of the potential benefits and costs of implementing specific preschool programs. To address this issue comprehensively, a meta-analysis was conducted for the purpose of synthesizing the outcomes of comparative studies in this area. Population/Participants/Subjects A total of 123 comparative studies of early childhood interventions were analyzed. Each study provided a number of contrasts, where a contrast is defined as the comparison of an intervention group of children with an alternative intervention or no intervention group. Intervention/Program/Practice A prevalent pedagogical approach in these studies was direct instruction, but inquiry-based pedagogical approaches also occurred in some interventions. No assumption was made that nominally similar interventions were equivalent. Research Design The meta-analytic database included both quasi-experimental and randomized studies. A coding strategy was developed to record information for computing study effects, study design, sample characteristics, and program characteristics. Findings/Results Consistent with the accrued research base on the effects of preschool education, significant effects were found in this study for children who attend a preschool program prior to entering kindergarten. Although the largest effect sizes were observed for cognitive outcomes, a preschool education was also found to impact children's social skills and school progress. Specific aspects of the treatments that positively correlated with gains included teacher-directed instruction and small-group instruction, but provision of additional services tended to be associated with negative gains. Conclusions/Recommendations Given the current state of research on the efficacy of early childhood interventions, there is both good and bad news. The good news is that a host of original and synthetic studies have found positive effects for a range of outcomes, and this pattern is clearest for outcomes relating to cognitive development. Moreover, many promising variables for program design have been identified and linked to outcomes, though little more can be said of the link than that it is positive. The bad news is that there is much less empirical information in the studies examined available for designing interventions at multiple levels with multiple components.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Education, Pediatrics, Perinatology and Child Health

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c59a2a526f317b90e84bdae43ba2a0ebf0c7583e

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In Clinical Psychology

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In Pediatrics, Perinatology and Child Health

Citations in the corpus

Do Bilinguals Have an Advantage in Theory of Mind? A Meta-Analysis (2018, background): “, a Cohen’s d in the “small” range) is similar to the effect of early education interventions on cognitive, school, and social outcomes (Camilli et al., 2010).”
Education Development in China: Education Return, Quality, and Equity (2019, result): “Consistent results of these studies are that early childhood education programs have positive effects on cognitive outcomes, social skills, and school performance at later stages of education [26,27].”
Do children benefit from universal early childhood education and care? A meta-analysis of evidence from natural experiments (2018, background): “6 control children for several years - sometimes decades - and generally find that the positive gains in test scores diminish with the time elapsed since the end of the program (Elango et al., 2016; Leak et al., 2010; Camilli et al., 2010).”
A Meta-Analytic Review of Preschool Social and Emotional Learning Interventions (2020, background): “…implemented with preschoolers have also shown improved outcomes in cognitive (e.g., Kautz et al., 2014; Walker, 2011), Murano et al. social (e.g., Camilli et al., 2010), and economic (Kautz et al., 2014) domains for children throughout their lifetimes, as well as high rates of return on…”
Can Early Childhood Curriculum Enhance Social-Emotional Competence in Low-Income Children? A Meta-Analysis of the Educational Effects (2018, background): “…the efficacy of ECC in improving children’s school readiness (e.g., Anderson et al., 2003; Chambers et al., 2010) and cognitive development (e.g., Burger, 2010; Camilli et al., 2010; Nelson, Westhues, & MacLeod, 2003), little is known about the effects of curricula on young children’s SEC.”
The added impact of parenting education in early childhood education programs: A meta-analysis (2016, methodology): “Trained coders were then required to achieve an interrater reliability rate with a master coder of 1.00 for effect sizes and .80 for all other study information, based on the procedure used in the meta-analytic database we built upon (Camilli et al., 2010).”