1998-1999 (the kindergarten year): The ECLS-K child assessments, parent interviews, and teacher questionnaires were conducted in the fall. Children, parents, and teachers participated again in the spring, along with school administrators.
1999-2000 (the first grade year): The ECLS-K conducted child assessments and parent interviews for a 30 percent sub-sample in the fall. The full sample of children, parents, teachers, and school administrators participated in the spring.
2002 (the third grade year): The ECLS-K conducted child assessments and parent interviews in the spring. Teachers and school administrators completed questionnaires.
2004 (the fifth grade year): The ECLS-K conducted child assessments and parent interviews in the spring. Teachers and school administrators completed questionnaires.
2007 (the eighth grade year): The ECLS-K followed the children into middle school. Information was collected from the children, their parents, teachers, and school administrators.
The Base Year (kindergarten year), First Grade, the Longitudinal Kindergarten - First Grade, the Third Grade, the Longitudinal Kindergarten through Third Grade, the Fifth Grade, and the Longitudinal Kindergarten through Fifth Grade data files are available for public use.
Due to NCES' confidentiality legislation, you will need to obtain (or amend) a restricted data license to access restricted data from the ECLS-K.
All ECLS-K data are released in CD-ROM format. The CD-ROMs include the data files, electronic codebooks (ECB), user's manuals, the survey instruments, and the record layouts. The ECB can be used to 1) examine variables in a data set, 2) examine question wording, response categories and frequency distributions, and 3) select and export variables along with the appropriate code needed to create SAS, SPSS-PC, and STATA datasets.
The following links are instructions relevant to documenting and repairing errors on ECLS-K Data Files.
