Impacts of Early Childhood Programs on Children: A Comprehensive Meta-Analysis

描述（由申请人提供）：在过去的几十年里，针对产前至5岁之间儿童及其家庭的早期儿童方案干预措施迅速扩大，代表了对儿童健康发展的大量公共投资。尽管已经进行了数百项评估研究，但我们缺乏对不同类型的计划改善儿童福祉的有效性的全面了解，以及计划强度如何在计划类型内和跨计划类型发挥作用。元分析提供了一个系统的方法，定量综合的整个人口的幼儿计划的评价和全方位的儿童服务，这些计划。然而，迄今为止，还没有整合多种程序类型和程序组件的荟萃分析。因此，政策制定者和项目管理者无法做出基于证据的决定，确定哪种类型的项目或项目组成部分最能有效地实现他们的目标。我们建议：1）完成1960年至2007年在美国进行的所有严格的幼儿计划评估数据库的编码; 2）按计划类型对儿童福祉的影响进行数据库范围的描述性分析（幼儿教育;育儿支助;父母社会经济支助;儿童营养支助）和主要方案特点; 3）了解程序组件和程序组件的组合如何预测特定子领域的影响程度;以及4）准备并发布元分析数据库供公众使用。我们提出的项目的一个关键创新是，该数据库将是第一个包括父母和儿童为重点的计划。第二，我们的评估研究的纳入标准更广泛（包括，例如，计量经济学研究）和更严格，比以前在这一领域的荟萃分析。最后，我们的数据库将成为第一个准备并发布供公众使用的幼儿Meta分析数据库。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Early childhood programs interventions for children and their families occurring between the prenatal period and age 5 have expanded rapidly in the past several decades and represent substantial public investments in children's healthy development. Despite the hundreds of evaluation studies that have been conducted, we lack a comprehensive understanding of the effectiveness of different types of programs for improving children's wellbeing, and how program intensity matters within and across program types. Meta-analysis provides a systematic method for quantitative synthesis of the entire population of early childhood program evaluations and for the full range of children served by these programs. Yet to date, no meta-analysis has integrated multiple program types and programmatic components. As a result, policymakers and program administrators are unable to make evidence-based decisions about which types of programs or program components would be most effective for meeting their goals. We propose to: 1) complete the coding of a database of all rigorous early childhood program evaluations conducted between 1960 and 2007 in the United States; 2) perform a database-wide descriptive analysis of impacts on children's wellbeing by program type (early childhood education; parenting support; parent socioeconomic support; support of child nutrition) and key program characteristics; 3) understand how programmatic components and combinations of programmatic components predict the magnitude of effects in particular child domains; and 4) prepare and release the meta-analytic database for public use. One key innovation of our proposed project is that the database will be the first to encompass both parent- and child-focused programs. A second is that our inclusion criteria for evaluation studies are both broader (including, for example, econometric studies) and more rigorous than have been employed in prior meta-analyses in this area. Finally, ours will be the first meta- analytic database in early childhood to be prepared and released for public use.