In 2009, the China Development Research Foundation of the State Council launched the One Village One Preschool (OVOP) initiative which aims to guarantee free early childhood education (ECE) access to all young children in China. According to statistics in 2017, almost all children (98%) in urban areas have access to ECE while only 30% of children from poor and rural areas have the access. OVOP is a variously sourced funded program that encompasses facilities, teaching components, and policy and organizational operations, through which children of a village can access preschool education without spending hours of commuting time.  Using students’ data during the years 2015 to 2018 from Songtao county in Guizhou, one of the poorest provinces in China, Chen and colleagues explored the effect of an ECE education experience on academic performance in grade 1 to grade 4.  Five types of ECE education experiences were compared: Township public ECE centres:...

A recent meta-analysis conducted by Mallawaarachchi and colleagues analyzed studies focused on the association of smartphone and tablet usage with psychosocial, cognitive, and sleep-related developmental factors in early childhood. The meta-analysis was conducted on 19 articles from a variety of countries. The mean ages for the children in these studies ranged from 1.43 years to 5.42 years. The overall findings of the meta-analysis suggest there is a weak, negative association (r = −.08, p = .001) between smartphone or tablet usage and child-specific factors. However, when individually analyzing these child-specific factors, most do not demonstrate significant associations with smartphone or tablet usage. Following factors show non-significant associations with smartphone or tablet usage: Psychosocial factors (r = −.07, p = .115) Self-regulation (r = −.03, p = .65) Cognitive factors (r = −.07, p = .14) Language development (r = −.09, p = .09) Executive function (r = −.09, p =...

There are ample evidence that social-emotional learning programs support behavioral and academic outcomes in students. However, few studies have looked at the “who” and “why” that make these programs work. In a study published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, implementation variability and participant risk status were examined as predictors of disruptive behavior outcomes. In this large cluster randomized controlled trial, seventy-seven English primary schools (N = 3,084 children, aged 6–7) were assigned to either receive the Good Behavior Game or to continue with business-as-usual. The Good Behavior Game is a universal behavior management intervention that encourages students to monitor their behavior in return for tangible rewards. Due to the clustered nature of the data, hierarchical linear models were fitted to the data. This study used intent-to-treat as well as complier average causal effects samples to compare findings between the two. Interestingly, intent-to-treat analysis found no discernible impact...

A recent randomized evaluation conducted in Norway investigated the effects of a small group mathematics instruction on student academic achievement in elementary school. The study involved 159 elementary schools and 14,891 students in 10 municipalities in Norway. Schools were randomly assigned to receive the intervention or business as usual. Students in the intervention group were pulled out from their regular math class into small groups homogenous for ability for 3-4 hours per week. Therefore, the small group instruction was delivered to all students in the class, not only to low-achieving students or pupils at risk for failure. The intervention lasts for one or two years with two periods of 4-6 weeks of intervention each year. The authors evaluated the effects of the intervention on student mathematics achievement in fifth grade – after one or two years of intervention – through the Norwegian national test. Results showed significant positive effects for...

A recent study published in Early Childhood Research Quarterly by Lawson-Adams and colleagues explores the value of sung songs and rhythmically spoken songs in teaching vocabulary to preschool students. The researchers used a within-subjects design with a total of 56 students (mean age = 4.8 years old) from 4 preschool classrooms within a district. The intervention was administered 3 times to each class over the course of 2 weeks, with each intervention lasting approximately 15 minutes. Each intervention consisted of 3 activities: a picture-card only activity a picture-card plus sung song activity a picture-card plus rhythmically spoken song activity Each activity consisted of 6 targeted vocabulary words that were spoken by the teacher 4 times each during the activity. For the song activities, each word was spoken twice and then appeared in the song twice, while in the picture-card only activity each word was spoken 4 times. The students took...

Parents are the first teachers of their children. The success of school education needs parental engagement. However, there is a cost to everything. What are the costs of encouraging more parental involvement in children’s science education? Robinson and her colleagues used a randomized field experiment to examine the effects of a text-messaging intervention in science education and identified opportunity costs of shifting parental effort from other subjects to science. The study took place in England. Grades 7-11 students from 5 secondary schools were randomly assigned to the treatment condition (n = 1,729) or the control condition (n = 1,754). Pre-treatment covariates showed no statistically significant differences between conditions. Through a pre-existing texting platform, parents of students in the treatment condition received around two text messages per week nudging them to ask students specific questions tied to their science curriculum. All else equal, parents in the control condition did not receive...

In the past few decades, there have been multiple studies showing that children often feel overconfident about their own competencies regarding handling new tasks and challenges. A recent study published in Child Development investigated the extent of self-overestimation among youngsters growing up in China and children in the Netherlands. Using both a memory task and a motor task, the researchers tracked the discrepancies between students’ estimated and actual performance across task trials. Two psychological explanations were explored: monitoring deficiency: young children are not yet capable of reliably monitoring and retaining information about their abilities and past performances. wishful thinking: young children often fail to reliably distinguish between their wishes and their expectations. Participants were children around aged 4 to 5. The study analyzed data from about 100 Chinese children from an urban area (Wenzhou City) and about 91 to 94 children from the Netherlands.  Children estimated the distance regarding ball...

A recent randomized evaluation conducted by Borman and colleagues investigated the effects of Building Assets, Reducing Risks (BARR) on student experience and academic outcomes. BARR is a model developed to address barriers to student success and consists of different strategies to build and improve relationships between staff, staff and students, and between students. Teachers and administrators in schools receive initial training and on-going coaching through observations and feedback on implementation. The study involved about 3,000 ninth graders from 11 American schools randomly assigned to receive the intervention over one year or to continue with their regular practice. Student academic achievement was measured through a standardized test, the Northwest Evaluation Association’s (NWEA) Measures of Academic Progress (MAP). Student experience was evaluated only at posttest. Results showed significant positive effects for mathematics achievement (ES = +0.11) but no significant results in reading (ES = +0.06). The authors concluded that BARR is a...

School Improvement Grants (SIGs) were grants for state education agencies to address underperformance in public schools in the US. The SIG program required schools to adopt a reform model by choosing among four alternatives: the transformation model required reforms in the school instructional and evaluation system and changing the leadership; the turnaround model required the same transformations plus replacing 50% of the staff; the restart model required closing the school and opening it under the leadership of an education management organization; and the closure model required closing the school. Among these models, most of the SIG schools chose the transformation model, some schools the turnaround model, and a few schools the restart model. A recent study evaluated the effects of SIGs on student academic achievement and graduation rates, focusing on schools that adopted the transformation and turnaround models. A total of 99 schools and 35,200 students in grades 3 and...