Protocol for "Academic interventions for children and students with low socioeconomic status: A systematic review"

This protocol describes the outline for a systematic review of interventions intended to improve the educational achievement of children and students from families that have low socioeconomic status (SES) in terms of for example parental income, parental education, and/or paren-tal occupation. The review will focus on interventions performed by pre-schools, schools, and local stakeholders, where studies have used a treatment-control/comparison design and have measured effects on test scores, grade point averages, and/or take up of high school/upper secondary school. We will use a broad search strategy including interventions from preschool through grade 10, i.e. we will include interventions with target groups from about 1 to 16-17 year-olds. Depending on the comparability of interventions and the number of included studies, this may result in separate meta-analyses and/or separate reviews. For ease of exposition, we refer consequently to “the review” below. We provide a short background and rationale for the review in sections 1.1 – 1.3. Section 2 describes the methods we will use, including a description of the types of studies we will include (2.1), search strategy (2.2), data extraction procedures (2.3), risk of bias assessment (2.4), and synthesis procedures (2.5). We also list the questions guiding the screening process in Appendix A, and describe the risk of bias tool in more detail in Appendix B.