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

描述(由申请人提供)：在过去几十年里，对产前至5岁之间的儿童及其家庭的干预措施迅速扩大，是对儿童健康发展的重大公共投资。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，以及计划强度在计划类型内和跨计划类型之间的重要性。元分析提供了一种系统的方法，用于量化综合整个人群的早期儿童计划评估，并为这些计划所服务的所有儿童提供系统的方法。然而，到目前为止，还没有元分析集成了多种程序类型和编程组件。因此，政策制定者和计划管理员无法做出基于证据的决定，决定哪些类型的计划或计划组成部分将最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幼儿计划评估的数据库编码；2)按计划类型(幼儿教育；育儿支持；父母社会经济支持；儿童营养支持)和关键计划特征，对对儿童福祉的影响进行数据库范围的描述性分析；3)了解计划组成部分和方案组成部分的组合如何预测特定儿童领域的影响程度；以及4)准备并发布元分析数据库，供公众使用。我们提议的项目的一个关键创新是，该数据库将是第一个同时涵盖以家长和儿童为重点的项目的数据库。第二，我们纳入评价研究的标准比这一领域以前的荟萃分析更广泛(例如，包括计量经济学研究)，也更严格。最后，我们的数据库将是第一个准备并发布给公众使用的儿童早期元分析数据库。

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.