Interventions that change educator behaviour to match standard global definitions of quality have delivered negligible effects on children's developmental outcomes¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · review r2 · q2
Currency · newest study 2026 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q2 i? Professional-development and intervention studies targeting educator behaviours were effective in changing educator behaviour but produced negligible effects on children's developmental outcomes. → Bly 2026

Evidence¶

Bly 2026¶

Bly, S., Houen, S., Staton, S., & Thorpe, K. (2026). Community, Children, Child: New Directions for Equitable Delivery Of High-Quality Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC). Educational Psychology Review. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-026-10215-7

q2 · i? · review · r2

The review attributes this finding to meta-analytic and synthesis work it cites (Egert et al., 2018; Pianta et al., 2016); the review reports it without printing effect sizes, so no magnitude is stated here.

"Yet, such interventions while effective in changing educator behaviours, have delivered negligible effect on children’s developmental outcomes (Egert et al., 2018; Pianta et al., 2016)."

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• Universal school-based SEL programs improve students' behaviour, with a small and, in recent randomised trials, negligible effect on academic achievement — related
• Improvements in caregiver book-sharing behaviour mediate the intervention's impact on child language (one mediation analysis) — reports the opposite
• Effects on secondary behavioural outcomes (conduct problems, delinquency, substance use) are negligible or non-significant — related
• SEL interventions improve attitudes, self-regulation, behaviour, and academic performance across reported effect-size ranges — related
• Measures of individual children's experiences within the ECEC group predict child development outcomes with higher effect sizes than global quality measures — related
• Test-based Quality Rating and Improvement Systems have been costly, inefficient, and subject to manipulation, while collaborative quality-improvement approaches are emerging — related
• In-service professional development for ECEC teachers produces a medium improvement in externally rated process quality (ES = 0.68) — related
• Global ECEC quality indices show little evidence of relating to child outcomes — related
• Prior meta-analyses report few or weak associations between ECEC quality indices and child progress, with process quality more predictive than structural quality — related