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Year:: 2019
Contributor:: Drew H. Bailey (author); Jade M. Jenkins (author); Daniela Alvarez-Vargas (author)
Genre:: grey literature
Subject:: education; achievement; meta-analysis; persistence and fadeout; intervention; Early childhood; Inequality; Methodology, measurement and data; Multiple outcomes of education; Program and policy effects

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Abstract:: The sustaining environments hypothesis refers to the popular idea, stemming from theories in developmental, cognitive, and educational psychology, that the long-term success of early educational interventions is contingent on the quality of the subsequent learning environment. Several studies have investigated whether specific kindergarten classroom and other elementary school factors account for patterns of persistence and fadeout of early educational interventions. These analyses focus on the statistical interaction between an early educational intervention – usually whether the child attended preschool – and several measures of the quality of the subsequent educational environment. The key prediction of the sustaining environments hypothesis is a positive interaction between these two variables. To quantify the strength of the evidence for such effects, we meta-analyze existing studies that have attempted to estimate interactions between preschool and later educational quality in the United States. We then attempt to establish the consistency of the direction and a plausible range of estimates of the interaction between preschool attendance and subsequent educational quality by using a specification curve analysis in a large, nationally representative dataset that has been used in several recent studies of the sustaining environments hypothesis. Both analyses yield interaction estimates of approximately 0. We consider a range of plausible explanations, including 1) the null hypothesis is true, 2) we did not have statistical power to detect interactions of a realistic magnitude, 3) model misspecification because of theoretical ambiguity, and 4) heterogeneity of these interactions across treatments, contexts, and children. We offer a set of recommendations for future research on the sustaining environments hypothesis.

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Drew H. Bailey, Jade M. Jenkins, and Daniela Alvarez-Vargas, "Complementarities between Early Educational Intervention and Later Educational Quality? A Systematic Review of the Sustaining Environments Hypothesis" (2019). EdWorkingPapers.com Archive. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:956608/

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EdWorkingPapers.com Archive

The Annenberg Institute at Brown University has developed this national working paper series to provide public access to high-quality papers from multiple disciplines on a wide variety of topics related to education. EdWorkingPapers focuses particularly on research with strong implications …
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Complementarities between Early Educational Intervention and Later Educational Quality? A Systematic Review of the Sustaining Environments Hypothesis