FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:  October 29, 2024

CONTACT:  Patrick Clinch, pclinch@skdknick.com

NEW YORK, N.Y. — There is a lot of buzz that boosting children’s social-emotional skills is critical to ensuring their short and long-term success in school and life. For decades, educators and researchers have pointed to tests like the famed “marshmallow test”—in which children were told they would receive a reward if they delayed eating a marshmallow—as indicators of a child’s potential for long-term success. These findings are often interpreted as evidence that early interventions should change skills like the ability to delay gratification, and such efforts will have cascading effects on their life course development. However, new research from Teachers College, Columbia University, challenges these assumptions. Associate Professor Tyler Watts and his team found that intervention impacts on both child social-emotional and cognitive skills fade in the short-term, challenging conventional wisdom that boosting early social-emotional skills will have enduring and life-changing effects. 

The study, Fadeout and Persistence of Intervention Impacts on Social-Emotional and Cognitive Skills in Children and Adolescents, authored by Emma Hart, Drew H. Bailey, Sha Luo, Pritha Sengupta, and Tyler Watts examined 86 early educational program randomized controlled trials involving 56,662 participants. The researchers measured educational intervention impacts on 450 outcomes, both immediately after the interventions and again in the following years. The findings revealed that while immediate improvements in cognitive and social-emotional skills were evident after the programs, these benefits diminished significantly over time. After 1 to 2 years, the effects on participants’ development were much weaker than previously assumed. 

“It makes logical sense that stronger social-emotional skills set children up for success, and that educational programs that boost these skills should generate ‘snowballing’ or ‘cascading’ effects that equip children to thrive in the short- and long-term,” said Emma R. Hart, doctoral candidate at Teachers College, and first-author of the new meta-analytic study. “However, when we compiled the best evidence from randomized control trial evaluations that have collected follow-up data, we found that development is much messier than expected. Although there is rigorous evidence showing that educational interventions can produce long-run effects on adult outcomes, our results imply that it is unlikely to be through sustained impacts on the social-emotional and cognitive skills researchers often directly target. We need new and creative research to make sense of what’s going on.”

This work echoes other recent findings from Watts’ lab. A separate study, Delay of Gratification and Adult Outcomes: The Marshmallow Test Does Not Reliably Predict Adult Functioning, led by Professor Tyler Watts alongside Jessica F. Sperber, Deborah Lowe Vandell, and Greg J. Duncan, tracked the life outcomes of individuals who took the marshmallow test at 54 months old. When assessed at age 26, there was no strong correlation between their performance on the marshmallow test and later metrics of success, such as salary, stability, or emotional health. The results suggest that changing a child’s narrow ability to delay gratification is not likely to have longer-term effects on their adult health.

“We want to be clear: educational interventions can have important effects on children, and sometimes these interventions appear to have effects that can be detected well into adulthood,” said Dr. Tyler Watts, senior author on the meta-analysis study and the recent re-examination of the Marshmallow Test. “Our work suggests that we are highly unlikely to find a ‘silver bullet’ skill that can be targeted by intervention and lead to all of the adult outcomes that we want to positively influence with our educational programs.”

Key Takeaways:

• Educational interventions have immediate benefits on cognitive and social-emotional skills, but these effects often fade significantly within 6 months to 2 years.
  
• While early interventions show initial improvements in both social-emotional and cognitive skills, intervention impacts on both types of skills fade at similar rates 
• Findings suggest that researchers are unlikely to discover a “silver bullet” skill or competency that an intervention can change and produce long-lasting effects as a result

About Teachers College, Columbia University
Founded in 1887, Teachers College, Columbia University, the first and largest graduate school of education in the United States, is perennially ranked among the nation’s best. Teachers College’s mission is to create a smarter, healthier, more equitable, and peaceful world. Teachers College engages in research and prepares professionals in its three main areas of expertise—education, health, and psychology— to work with public and private entities in local, national, and global communities and inform public policy. Students choose from among 150 separate programs to earn graduate degrees, which are conferred by Columbia University. While it is closely affiliated with Columbia University and collaborates with it on many programs, the College is an independent, autonomous institution with a separate, independent governing board, president, and financial endowment. For more information please visit www.tc.edu.