Can anyone put a price on a child's education? As a result of a glaring deficiency of research on the costs of early childhood policies and programs, Kabay and colleagues sought to rectify this gap by examining the costs of preK in Boston. Their goals in this study were to: Estimate how much Boston's highly effective public preschool program costs overall. Break down costs that are used only by the preschool and those that are system-wide. Quantify how costs change over time, in particular comparing startup and maintenance costs. Generalize costs in Boston to be nationally-representative. Their findings indicated that the total per-child costs for one year of prekindergarten in Boston ranged from $15,240 during a time of maintenance to $18,210 during a time of expansion. Systems costs comprised approximately 40% of the total costs of prekindergarten, consequently only 60% of the total cost of prekindergarten was in additive costs. This...

A team of scholars evaluated the effects of a high-quality PreK learning environment on subsequent years of schooling. The study included the second cohort of children who entered PreK in the 2010-2011 school year in the Tennessee Voluntary Prekindergarten Program, a well-known randomized experiment on PreK effectiveness, which found initial positive effects of PreK attendance, fading out over time. The final sample of the current study, after excluding 434 children with missing data, was composed of 806 students, including 491 PreK participants, and 315 non-participants. The results showed that: Neither attending high-quality schools, nor being taught by high-quality teachers, solely demonstrated significant evidence for the persistence of positive PreK effects through 3rd grade. However, when children were exposed to both high-quality schools and high-quality teachers, children who participated in PreK programs showed significantly greater achievement in ELA (b = .15, SE = .07, p < .05) and math (b = .17, SE...

Amicable student-teacher relationships (STRs) contribute to students’ cognitive, social, and emotional development. In order to facilitate positive STRs, it is important to understand effective practices from past rigorous studies. A recent meta-analysis, published in Review of Educational Research, aims to identify the most effective and the most common practice elements for school- and class-wide STR programs. This meta-analysis reviews randomized controlled trials or quasi-experimental designs within the PreK-12 realm. After applying inclusion criteria, researchers from the University of Minnesota identified 21 studies and 13 unique STR programs. STR was measured by a teacher-reported 28-item scale that assessed their interpersonal relationships with students. On average, the combined weighted effect size shows that the included programs had a modest effect size on overall STR (ES=+0.26). The authors also highlighted two universal programs that demonstrate the largest effect sizes: Establish-Maintain-Restore(ES=+0.64) and BRIDGE (ES=+0.65). Apart from program-based analysis, the authors also explored the effectiveness of different practice types. Understandably, preventative...

A recent study published in Educational Researcher explored the long-term impacts of an early childhood educational (ECE) intervention. Watt and colleagues utilized data from the Chicago School Readiness Project (CSRP), which implemented an intervention from 2004 – 2006, along with student enrollment information from the 2016-2017 school year. The initial CSRP intervention focused on addressing behavioral concerns in students and included increased professional development opportunities for teachers and increased access to mental health professionals for teachers and families. This intervention took place in 35 classrooms with 602 students and utilized a cluster-randomized control trial to explore the effectiveness of the CSRP intervention. Watt and colleagues were able to obtain 2016-2017 enrollment information on 461 of those 602 students. For the current study, the researchers were interested in analyzing the impact that the CSRP intervention had on future school selection.  They discovered that： Students from the treatment groups were 11.84 percent less likely (p < .001) to enroll in...

Recent controversy has surrounded the effectiveness of school turnaround efforts--programs designed to significantly reform schools or districts through changes to organization, staffing, and governance--to address student outcomes.  A recent meta-analysis by Redding & Nguyen seeks to shed light on the issue by examining the association between different forms of school turnaround and attendance, standardized test scores, and graduation rates. They highlight four school turnaround mechanisms—transformation and turnaround (including comprehensive instructional reform or teacher and principal effectiveness reforms), changes in human capital (through replacing the principal or teachers), changes in governance or management of low-performing schools (such as through state takeover of schools or school districts, closures of schools, or transitioning schools to charter status), and high-stakes accountability policies. Thirty-five of 13,800 studies screened were eligible for the analysis, showing that: There is evidence of positive association between school turnaround, transformation, and school restart and improvements in student attendance, math and ELA test scores, and graduation....

INSIGHTS into Children’s Temperament is a comprehensive school-based intervention with the aim of improving social-emotional skills and behaviors of students. This program involves teachers, parents, and children through sessions dedicated to each of these targets. In-class activities with students focus on empathy and problem-solving skills using puppets that exemplify temperament typologies. A recent article published in the Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness reported the long-term results of a group of students who participated in a two-year randomized controlled trial. Twenty-two elementary schools in New York City serving low SES students participated in the study. Students were in grades K-1 and more than 50% received free- or reduced-price lunch. Across a two-year study, the intervention was delivered for 10 weeks in kindergarten and for other 10 weeks in first grade. McCormick and colleagues focused on the follow-up outcomes of the group of students who received the intervention for two years. The authors accessed students’...

Computer-assisted learning (CAL) is gaining popularity due to its promise of cost-effectiveness, individualized approach, and enhanced engagement. However, before incorporating CAL in traditional classrooms, it is important to understand the effectiveness of CAL. Recent research, published in Educational Research Review, presents a meta-analysis on computer-supported early literacy interventions in preschool and kindergarten settings to provide some insights into the overall effect and determinants of CAL. Including only randomized trials and quasi-experimental designs, Ludo Verhoeven and his colleagues selected 59 qualified and rigorous studies, which involved a total of 6,786 preschool and kindergarten students. The outcomes of interest were children’s phonological awareness and reading-related skills in alphabetic languages. Statistical analysis showed that Computer-supported early literacy interventions, on average, had small but positive and statistically important effects on learning outcomes (ES = +0.28). This effect size was smaller than those found in previous meta-analyses that investigated teacher-supported early literacy interventions, which lends evidence to...

Academic achievement is thought to be influenced by family socioeconomic status (SES), but the relationship is also affected by government interventions. A meta-analysis recently published in Educational Psychology Review examined the relationship between family SES and academic achievement in China and whether year, grade level, type of SES measures, and subjects of academic achievement moderate that relationship. The analysis was based on data drawn from 215,649 students in 62 studies (78 independent samples). Studies included in the search process were those conducted from January 1979 to May 2017 written in English or Chinese. To be included in the analysis, studies needed to be focused on the relation between SES and academic achievement, contain sufficient statistical detail, and be carried out on students from kindergarten to senior high school in China. The meta-analysis excluded any duplicated data and studies containing obvious errors or insufficient information. The key findings were: SES is...

Compared to monolingual people, bilingual people are generally considered to have a cognitive advantage related to executive function (EF). A recent meta-analysis conducted by Gunnerud and colleagues investigated whether bilingual children had an advantage in EF by examining different components of inhibition, switching, attention, monitoring, working memory, and planning. 100 publications (between 1980 to 2017) were identified, which included 143 group comparisons and 583 effect sizes. The bilingual advantage was statistically significant in overall EF (ES=+0.06). The study further performed a moderator analysis to investigate whether a cognitive advantage could occur under certain conditions. Regarding sample characteristics, the results showed that: Socioeconomic status (SES) difference was a significant moderator variable, and middle-class SES children had a greater bilingual advantage than lower-class children (β=0.235; p =.017) and upper-middle-class children (β=0.230; p =.046). Also, results from one lab showed a significantly larger effect than the studies from other labs (β=0.153; p =.011). In terms...