2025 Theses Doctoral

Understanding Child Skill Development by Examining Longitudinal Educational Intervention Impacts

Hart, Emma R.

A central focus of much psychological research is identifying the extent to which childhood experiences and skills shape variation in life course trajectories. Grounded in developmental theory, educational interventions are often designed with the goal of changing long-term functioning through targeting children’s skills. Contrary to theory, growing evidence from the intervention evaluation literature suggests that (1) initial program impacts on children's cognitive skills fade and, (2) interventions can yield long-run impacts on adult outcomes nonetheless. In this dissertation, I examined the longitudinal impacts of educational interventions. Through this work, I aimed to progress our understanding of when and how exogenous changes to children’s skills shape subsequent development.

Using meta-analytic techniques and three datasets, I observed that short-term fadeout is ubiquitous; initial intervention impacts faded considerably in the years after interventions ended. Regardless, interventions generated long-run impacts on adult outcomes. Social-emotional skill persistence appeared unlikely to explain these dynamics; intervention impacts on social-emotional skills faded in the years after interventions ended. I found promising support for the hypotheses proposed by the Large Interconnected Network Theory (LINT), suggesting that skill-to-skill transfer processes may underlie the emergence of network-level intervention impacts that ultimately impact adult functioning. I discussed these findings in the context of existing conceptualizations of skill building and suggested future directions for research.