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

在过去的几十年里，早期儿童项目——针对儿童及其家庭的产前和5岁之间的干预措施——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，但我们对不同类型的项目在改善儿童福祉方面的有效性缺乏全面的了解，以及项目强度在项目类型内部和跨项目类型之间的关系。荟萃分析提供了一种系统的方法，用于定量综合整个早期儿童项目的评估，以及这些项目所服务的所有儿童。然而到目前为止，还没有荟萃分析整合了多种方案类型和方案组成部分。因此，政策制定者和项目管理者无法对哪种类型的项目或项目组成部分最有效地实现其目标做出基于证据的决策。我们建议：1)完成一个数据库的编码，该数据库包含1960年至2007年间在美国进行的所有严格的早期儿童项目评估；2)对项目类型（幼儿教育、父母支持、父母社会经济支持、儿童营养支持）和关键项目特征对儿童福祉的影响进行全数据库描述性分析；3)了解规划成分和规划成分的组合如何预测特定子领域的影响程度；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同时包含以家长和儿童为重点的项目的数据库。其次，我们对评估研究的纳入标准既更广泛（包括，例如，计量经济学研究），也比该领域先前的荟萃分析更严格。最后，我们的数据库将是第一个准备和发布供公众使用的幼儿元分析数据库。

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.