New Program Evaluation Report: What Works and What Doesn’t for Boys and Girls

Child Trends recently released two fact sheets examining practices that had positive, negative or neutral impacts on boys and girls: What Works for Female Children and Adolescents: Lessons From Experimental Evaluations of Programs and Interventions and What Works for Male Children and Adolescents: Lessons From Experimental Evaluations of Programs and Interventions.
Child Trends evaluated 115 random assignment intent-to-treat intervention programs for boys and 106 for girls, and published findings broken down in a number of outcome areas including Academic Achievement & School Engagement, Delinquency, Mental Health & Internalizing, Physical Health and Nutrition, Reproductive Health and Substance Abuse.
Overall, both boys and girls responded well to mentoring--this type of intervention showed positive results in academic achievement. However, boys and girls differed in several other areas. Via the boys’ report:

For example, for reproductive health, while one-on-one interventions led to positive impacts for females, we found that experiential learning activities that included group activities were often effective for boys. Similarly, while social skills training interventions were not successful for female children and adolescents in reducing externalizing behaviors, in many cases for males, these types of interventions were successful.

The full reports are available online, and each includes a helpful table breaking the data out by outcome area, not found to work, mixed reviews, and found to work. The table begins on page 10 of the boys’ report and page 12 of the girls’ report.

David Backes writes the Friday news roundup for Reclaiming Futures and contributes articles about juvenile justice reform and adolescent substance abuse treatment to ReclaimingFutures.org. He has a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Santa Clara University. David works as an account executive for Prichard Communications.