Emma Rose Hart is the 2026 Sigrid Blömeke Scholarship Award recipient. She is postdoctoral research fellow in the Lynch School for Education and Human Development at Boston College.
Hart feels very honored to be awarded this scholarship:
– CREATE is a hub for high quality research aimed at advancing our understanding of educational inequity and how to address it. Having the opportunity to work with CREATE researchers is a great opportunity to learn from interdisciplinary experts and work together to answer research questions of high value to the field. I am particularly excited to get to use Norway’s incredibly rich data through collaborations with CREATE researchers.
Examining the long-run effects of an educational intervention
Hart explains that applied research in psychology and education aims to use science to improve the human condition, by intervening to change factors that matter for children’s development:
– A great deal of research is focused on both identifying the causes of disparities in children’s long-run developmental trajectories and intervening to change the factors that matter.
By examining the long-run effects of randomizing children to receive - or not receive - an educational intervention, research can help us understand the durability of the intervention as well as the basic processes underlying development, such as the ways in which skill gains at an earlier period in development shape skills at later periods of development.
– In a series of projects with my colleagues Tyler Watts and Drew Bailey, we have synthesized the initial and follow-up effects of a diverse range of educational interventions, all aimed at changing children’s long-run trajectories through improving social-emotional and/or cognitive skills, such as self-regulation and reading skills.
Impacts fade but it is possible to produce long-run-effects
Hart and her colleagues have learned several important lessons from this work:
- First, educational interventions often produce initial impacts on child skills, but these impacts fade considerably in the months and years after interventions end. (by ~50-60% 6-12months after the intervention concludes).
- Second, fadeout does not seem to be a failing of specific interventions or researchers. Fadeout is common across both cognitive and social-emotional skills, and a broad range of intervention characteristics (e.g., developmental timing, parental involvement, intervention duration).
- Interestingly, Hart and her colleagues have observed that despite fadeout, programs can nonetheless generate long-run impacts on important adult outcomes that are similar in magnitude to short-run faded effects (~.05 SD). They see some, but not very strong correspondence between initial impacts on child skills and an intervention’s long-run impacts on adult outcomes.
– Together, our work demonstrates that it is possible for interventions to generate long-run effects despite fadeout and that we should probably expect fadeout as a regular occurrence following educational interventions. It remains a big and open question, then, how interventions generate long-run effects, which is an important direction for future work, Hart says.
Norway is a perfect place for Hart to test key theories about fadeout
The main aim of the project that Hart is doing in collaborating with CREATE, is to understand the factors that contribute to fadeout and persistence.
In the literature, one explanation for fadeout, particularly following early childhood education and care (ECEC) interventions, is that subsequent educational environments do not provide sufficient opportunities for students to build on the skills that they acquired through ECEC.
– The theory, termed the Sustaining Environments Hypothesis, argues that perhaps the benefits of ECEC will persist, and potentially even be amplified, when followed by high quality subsequent educational opportunities.
But studies that have attempted to test the Sustaining Environment Hypothesis have found mixed results. One highly influential study observed support for the theory. Meta-analytic work has demonstrated that there appears to be no benefit overall.
– More recently, a very large-scale examination led by Jade Jenkins, Tyler Watts, and Ken Dodge in the U.S. observed the opposite of what the theory proposes: the effects of ECEC faded more when followed by high quality educational experiences.
How is this possible? Hart explains that the learning environment in the U.S may explain it:
– Insofar as higher quality environments are exactly the contexts that promote accelerated learning and “catch-up” among children who did not attend ECEC, high-quality contexts may actually be associated with more fadeout vis-à-vis control-group catch-up, especially when there is considerable redundancy in the experiences provided by ECEC and primary school.
Hart believes that Norway presents an interesting context to test these ideas:
– Beyond the incredible affordances of the Norwegian data, including large sample sizes, the opportunity to capitalize on seemingly random expansions in ECEC across municipalities in the early 2000s, the ECEC context provides an interesting setting to test the Sustaining Environments Hypothesis.
- Norway’s ECEC system may be pedagogically distinct from formal schooling in ways that reduce instructional redundancy.
- Indeed, Norwegian ECEC prioritizes play and time spent in nature, experiences that may be different than those provided by primary school.
- If so, the skills children learn through ECEC may be more distinct from those that they can gain through primary school, regardless of quality, reducing the likelihood of control-group catch-up.
– For these reasons, Norway may be a setting where we are more likely to observe support for the Sustaining Environments Hypothesis. Thus, I am working with CREATE researchers Henrik Zachrisson and Nicolai Borgen to test the Sustaining Environments Hypothesis in Norway, Hart explains.
This project directly relates to Hart’s previous and ongoing research by examining the conditions under which intervention impacts are more likely to persist or fade, with application to our basic understanding of developmental processes.
– Specifically, whether opportunities to develop skills in early childhood generally act in complementary and compounding ways or as substitutes, Hart stresses.
The research findings are relevant for the wider research and policy communities in the US and elsewhere
– By understanding the factors that contribute to fadeout and persistence, we can advance our theories of development and ultimately, hopefully, design better interventions, Hart claims.
Hart emphasizes that the national Norwegian data systems and MoBa study provide a uniquely strong context for examining the Sustaining Environments Hypothesis.
– Strong data allows for more accurate and reliable inferences and, thus, increases the likelihood that science can inform intervention work to the benefit of children and families. For all the reasons that Norway is an interesting context for testing the Sustaining Environments Hypothesis, the results may provide a sort of “upward bound” for what we can expect to find in other settings, she says enthusiastically.
