@EdWorkingPaper{ai23-782,
title = "Do Intervention Impacts on Social-Emotional Skills Persist at Higher Rates than Impacts on Cognitive Skills? A Meta-Analysis of Educational RCTs with Follow-Up",
author = "Emma R. Hart, Drew H. Bailey, Sha Luo, Pritha Sengupta, Tyler W. Watts",
institution = "Annenberg Institute at Brown University",
number = "782",
year = "2023",
month = "June",
URL = "http://www.edworkingpapers.com/ai23-782",
abstract = {Fadeout is a pervasive phenomenon: post-test impacts on cognitive skills commonly decrease in the years following an educational intervention. Less is known, although much is theorized, about social-emotional skill persistence. The current meta-analysis investigated whether educational RCT impacts on social-emotional skills demonstrated greater persistence than impacts on cognitive skills among 87 interventions involving 59,237 participants and 443 outcomes measured at post-test and at least one follow-up. For post-test impacts of the same magnitude, persistence rates were similar (43% of post-test magnitude) across skill types for follow-ups occurring 6 to 12 months after post-test. At 1- to 2-year follow-ups, persistence rates were larger for cognitive skills (37%) than for social-emotional skills. Interestingly, smaller posttest impacts persisted at proportionately higher rates than larger impacts, which may benefit interventions measuring social-emotional outcomes given their smaller post-test impacts. Considered in whole, social-emotional and cognitive skills demonstrated similar patterns of fadeout.},
}