In January 2007, each student in FSoS 5014, Introduction to Quantitative Family Research Methods, was asked to summarize and evaluate information about a secondary data set used in the family field. The following summary was prepared by Holly Carmichael.
The study aims to ascertain information about the knowledge of and skills of young children as they enter kindergarten and progress through early education. It also helps researchers understand what is going on in early education to help explain the outcomes related to later education. Further, it is expected to enable researchers to study the influence of contextual factors on school performance.
The study is sponsored and conducted by the National Center of Education Statistics. The following federal agencies have supported the study in various ways as well:
· Administration on Children, Youth, and Families (ACYF), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)
· Economic Research Service (ERS), U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)
· Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP), U.S. Department of Education
· Office of English Language Acquisition (OELA), U.S. Department of Education
· Policy and Programs Studies Services, U.S. Department of Education
· National Center for Special Education Research (NCSER), IES, U.S. Department of Education
Data was collected in both the fall and spring of kindergarten (1998-999), the fall and spring of 1st grade (1999-2000), the spring of 3rd grade (2002), 5th grade (2004) and expect to be administered in the spring of 8th grade (2007) as well.
Six waves of data have been collected and an additional one is scheduled to be conducted later this year. The age of the participants was not a factor of inclusion, rather the grade of school that the participants were in were considered. Data was collected when participants were in kindergarten, in 1st grade, in 3rd grade, in 5th grade, and researchers expected to collect data while they are in 8th grade as well.
The children in ECLS-K come from both public and private schools and attended both full-day and part-day kindergarten programs. They come from diverse socioeconomic and racial/ethnic backgrounds. Also participating in the study are the children's parents, teachers, and schools. The initial sample was 22000 kindergarten students.
Data was collected through teacher questionnaires, parent interviews, school administrator questionnaires, student records, student questionnaires, student interviews, facilities checklists, and fact sheets.
Assess strengths and weakness of data:
The data are taken from a number of perspectives and a number of methods, providing a potential for triangulation. Given that this is a longitudinal study, I assume (though I cannot find proof) that many blanks are embedded in the responses and would need to be considered before a researcher chose to use the data. I think that it would also take a good amount of time for a researcher to become comfortable with all of the nuances of the measurements, given the vast number of them and the many relationships that I assume are set up. The data cover many variables of child progress, but may not cover any one variable extensively given the large number of supporting agencies (and thus, contradicting agendas).
Though a restricted data license is required to access restricted data, the majority of the data from the study are available for public use. Data is released on CD-Rom by sending an email to ecls@ed.gov. There is no mention of the cost of the data.
Assessment of how useful the data set is for family research:
I think the dataset could be very useful to studies created with a family perspective. Parents and children are both respondents, thus allowing researchers to understand patterns and trends between the two. It would be interesting to connect the parent/child data to sibling data as well, but this seems to be out of scope.
Website: http://nces.ed.gov/ecls/Kindergarten.asp
Full of information and easy to maneuver around on.