Fadeout and persistence of intervention impacts on social-emotional and cognitive skills in children and adolescents: A meta-analytic review of randomized controlled trials

Abstract

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. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).