The Effects of Early Childhood Science Educational Interventions on Children’s Science Achievement

The importance of providing children with more robust opportunities to access high-quality science instruction is a widely recognized challenge. Unfortunately, science instruction is often neglected in the earliest school grades, meaning that many young children face opportunity gaps in learning science. We present the results of a meta-analysis of experimental and quasi-experimental research of the effects of classroom-based preschool/pre–K–first grade science educational interventions. We find that, on average, treatment group children in early science educational interventions demonstrated significantly stronger science achievement outcomes compared with control group children. Most of the programmatic and contextual moderator variables examined were not significant predictors of the magnitudes of achievement impacts. Rather, it appeared that a variety of different intervention strategies could effectively improve early science learning outcomes. We found suggestive evidence of positive impacts on children’s literacy and social-emotional learning outcomes, and on teacher-level outcomes. We discuss implications and promising directions for future research.