A 20-year Follow-Up to an Early Childhood Stimulation Program in Jamaica
povertyactionlab.org
povertyactionlab.org
The stimulation intervention included weekly home visits by trained community health workers, who encouraged and instructed mothers on how to play and interact with their children. For the nutrition intervention, health workers distributed weekly nutritional supplements to homes, as well as additional cornmeal and skimmed milk powder to discourage sharing of the supplement with other family members.
Result:
Most notably, children who received stimulation achieved 0.6 more years of schooling, or 5.6 percent more schooling, than participating children who did not receive stimulation, and were nearly three times as likely to have had some college-level education.
The 5% more and the 300% more just seem wildly out of kilter
(It kind of makes sense - if all your peers stop school at 16 and you stay for 7 months or more, suddenly getting to college is a much easier step.) I think i am just surprised by how surprised i am
If you do your intervention and 2 out of 127 children enroll in a college when you would have expected 0.7, you've tripled the expected rate, but that was easy to do by chance.
In this case, the sample size was presumably half that, around 64.
Say... Kids get 10.5 years schooling on average in neighborhood A. 12 years in neighborhood B. That is a 1.5 years or 15% difference. In a 12 grade system, this is the best possible result implying a 100% completion rate.
Neighborhood A sends 10% of all kids to college. Neighborhood B sends 50% of all kids to college. That's a 500% difference.
This example seems pretty plausible. A neighborhood where an average kid makes it halfway through 10th grade probably sends a lot fewer kids to college than a neighborhood with a 100% completion rate for grade 12.
I haven't seen the data, so I don't know if this is the case, but one explanation is that this intervention works really well for some people, and not at all for others. Also, I think "3x more likely" means 200% more people.
So the numbers could be something like: 100 participants, 5 would have gone to college. The social stimulation really benefited 10 kids. They, in turn, did years more schooling and went to college. 5% -> 15% college rate is 3x more likely, but the 10 kids' large increase in attendance was averaged out over the group of 100, so the overall increase was just 5%.
Not saying this is the case, just showing a way those numbers could be plausible.
Randomized Control Trial
"Correlation does not imply causation" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_cause_and_consequen...
It's really easy to see that lots of reasons that aren't directly due to the program could have caused the changes. It could have been as simple as an expectation change amongst the parents, upon joining the program; how their children will perform better and therefore they did or it could have been the parents in the neighborhood most engaged in their children having a better life and when the opportunity to join the program became available they joined.
Stuff like this is notoriously difficult to prove, but I'm hopeful and glad to see research is being done.
That was my first thought too: the positive results could be effect of special attention and expectations (placebo effect). However comparing "both interventions" group with each single intervention group should address this.
While possibly true, none of those claims have any bearing on whether or not those alternate explanations are false.
To me this seems like a warning that the intervention is unlikely to have much effect as applied to society in general. Three times the likelihood of an impoverished Jamaican going to college isn't that impressive. On the other hand, if we accepted this assessment of impact in the terms being reported here, applying it to better-off people could lead to more than 240% of their children going to college!
...which again suggests that whatever's going on is probably better viewed in other terms.
- It's very easy to increase really small numbers by a factor of three, but this large percentage increase is not particularly meaningful.
- Many demographics go to college at such high rates that it would be impossible to increase those rates by a factor of three. Since it's impossible, the intervention probably can't accomplish it.
Helping the less advantaged merits more of our attention than the well to do anyway.
The top-level poster replied to here clearly did.
"The nutritional intervention (groups 2 and 3) consisted of giving 1 kg of formula containing 66% of daily-recommended energy (calories), protein, and micronutrients provided weekly for 24 months"
The article implies that the families likely split the formula for multiple members, thus diminishing any effect it may have had on the baby's development.
It can certainly be argued that children that sit in a classroom for 16 years may lose much of the spontaneity and natural desire to explore that they were born with.
They might be a lot more passive, accept what is handed to them with less skepticism and fewer questions, be hesitant to try things without social proof, and may be ignorant of how the world actually works. They may be more likely to live in their heads and be less in touch with their own very real needs.
A lot of things can be argued, but not all can be substantiated. Even if I agreed that studying somehow harms children, that would only encourage society to rethink _how_ but not _whether_ to train children.
(Where "lucked out" doesn't mean it was worth it. It's relative.)
You just need to look at the upside enjoyed by other countries which have seriously invested in education. The easiest example is South Korea. I'm not saying it's perfect, but they went from the Korean War to Samsung and LG in half a century.
The reason I ask is: we did an exercise recently where we had to go through the various assumptions for a product. The assumptions we made were
1: education = better outcomes
2: more education = better
3: formal higher education is necessary for getting a job
4: people actually need to get jobs
I am not convinced these are true.
Someone who has a lot less education in the UK would likely have far more opportunities.