Happy New Year!
With the start of 2025, many of us are making new year’s resolutions, thinking ahead to what we can change and improve upon in the coming year. We here on the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2023–24 (ECLS-K:2024) team are doing the same. We are planning for another year of study activities and are excited that the new data being added to the ECLS program will be able to inform research, policy, and practice over the coming years.
The ECLS-K:2024 has a busy year ahead. We are processing the data collected from respondents during the 2023-24 school year in preparation for our first data file release in early 2026. We’re also building upon lessons learned from our field work last spring to improve our data collection procedures for all future study rounds. We continue to update participants on resources available from NCES via our study newsletters.
We will be collecting the second round of data this spring. Direct assessments of reading, math, and executive function will be conducted with students, most of whom will have advanced to first grade for the 2024-25 school year. Parents, teachers (including special education teachers), and school administrators will complete surveys. So much of the rich information we have on children, their experiences, and their outcomes comes from these adults in children’s lives. These additional rounds of collection will provide data that allow for examinations of children’s experiences and progress across the elementary school years.
Many of you are excited to start working with the ECLS-K:2024 data, and we are working hard to get them ready for release. The ECLS-K:2024 collects data on emerging topics of relevance to families, educators, and policymakers, some of which have not been fully examined in our earlier ECLS program studies. For instance, one of the most notable events between the earlier ECLS program studies and the time the ECLS-K:2024 was launched is the COVID-19 pandemic. The ECLS-K:2024 is NCES’s first early childhood longitudinal study to provide data on students who experienced the coronavirus pandemic. We included items in the ECLS-K:2024 kindergarten surveys to ask parents about:
- Any family concerns about their kindergartner’s education and services received, given the pandemic;
- Reasons for delaying their child’s enrollment in kindergarten for those children whose kindergarten entry was delayed;
- Children’s social and learning experiences during the pandemic (for example, limited in-person and virtual interactions with others, participation in learning pods and extracurricular activities);
- Early care and education arrangements during the pandemic;
- Gaps or delays in receiving IFSP-, IEP-, or 504 plan-related services during the pandemic; and
- Increases in stress due to the pandemic.
In the kindergarten year we also asked school administrators whether:
- they used blended or hybrid instruction during the 2023-24 school year; and
- the school received any funding or federal aid to pay for COVID-related expenses through the American Rescue Plan and, if so, how the funding was used.
Classroom teachers provided kindergarten year information about:
- concerns about kindergarten readiness due to the pandemic;
- strategies to address kindergarten readiness and learning loss;
- professional development related to remote learning; and
- severity of professional challenges.
Additionally, many items used in the ECLS-K:2024 had previously been included in the sister studies, the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-99 (ECLS-K) and the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2010-11 (ECLS-K:2011). By comparing data from these same questions across different groups of children who have participated in the ECLS program studies, we can see differences and similarities in education and child development outcomes between the pre- and post-COVID worlds. For example, we will be able to update information like what’s shown in the infographic below, which uses ECLS-K:2011 data to show how children’s positive learning behaviors in the fall of kindergarten relate to children’s academic scores in the later grades.
In addition to the information on the post-pandemic experiences of young children, as discussed in our blog post last March, our upcoming data release will provide rich, descriptive information about kindergartners and their families. With our first ECLS-K:2024 data file release, the ECLS program will provide information on some topics for the first time, including suspensions; school-level percentages of students who are chronically absent, experiencing homelessness, and from migrant families; number of school days disrupted or canceled due to emergencies; and school policy on and use of funds raised by parent-teacher association/parent-teacher organization.
The ECLS-K:2024 team is optimistic this will be a great year for the study. We hope you’ll continue to follow the ECLS-K:2024 through 2025 and beyond, to learn how the latest cohort progresses.
Want to learn more?
Be on the lookout for one ECLS blog post per season in 2025, with the next one slated for release in the spring. Stay tuned!
By Jill Carlivati McCarroll, NCES