Despite decades of educational intervention research built on developmental theory, a puzzling pattern continues to perplex the field: educational intervention impacts on child skills often fade, yet some interventions nonetheless produce lasting effects on adult outcomes. The fadeout-emergence paradox raises fundamental questions about development and our ability to apply psychological theories through interventions to improve the human condition. In this talk, I will present new meta-analytic data on the long-run effects of RCT-evaluated educational interventions, examining how common fadeout is and whether it generally precludes long-run impacts on adult outcomes.
Emma Hart is the 2026 Sigrid Blömeke Scholarship Award recipient. She is Post Doc at Boston College Lynch School of Education and Human Development. She has made groundbreaking contributions to the study of fade-out of intervention effects, among other things.