IES Blog

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?

• Check out this brief video about the ECLS program.
• Read up on the ECLS-K:2024 on NCES’s ECLS website or our ECLS website for study participants.
• Find resources for parents, teachers, and school administrators that use ECLS and other NCES data in our ECLS newsletters.
• Find other ECLS posts on the NCES Blog.
• Sign up for the NCES Newsflash.
• Follow NCES on LinkedIn, X, and Facebook.

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

Hello December! With Thanksgiving wrapped up, this is the perfect time to thank all the staff that support the ECLS study. We recognize all that principals, teachers, and other school staff do for the ECLS study, and we are very grateful! In most schools, staff have been hard at work for weeks, or even months, communicating with our school recruiter staff, and we thank them for all of their effort.

Although the ECLS-K:2024 did not conduct study activities in classrooms in the fall of 2024, we have been getting ready for our next data collection in spring 2025, when most of the study children will have advanced to first grade. Just as we are thankful for the schools, principals, and teachers around the country, we are thankful for our team of dedicated ECLS staffers who are preparing for our next set of activities. Over the past few months, we have been reaching out to schools that participated last year—as well as the schools to which our study children have transferred—and preparing them for the next round of ECLS activities. Staying in touch with schools this fall before we visit them in the spring allows for us to identify any changes that have occurred with the schools, such as administration changes or staff changes, or any scheduling constraints that we will work around to make study participation as easy as possible for them. This way, when we do get ready to talk with our participants in the spring, the schools will be well prepared for our arrival!

As mentioned in previous blogs, the data we collect from schools, such as information on their school’s characteristics, play a vital role in our understanding of the resources available to and outstanding needs of the school systems across the United States. For example, did you know that 84.6 percent of public elementary schools educating kindergartners in 2010-11 had translators available to parents? With a growing and diverse population, it’s important to know what resources are available for children and their families today, and the forthcoming ECLS-K:2024 data will provide that answer.

In all rounds of ECLS-K:2024 data collection, the study collects in-depth information from participating students’ teachers. In the base (kindergarten) year of the study, the data are nationally representative of teachers of kindergartners, data which when compared to the earlier ECLS program studies, provide us with insight into trends in the composition of America’s kindergarten teachers over the decades. In later years of ECLS-K:2024, including in the upcoming spring 2025 data collection, teachers continue to provide information on both themselves and their study students. The ECLS-K:2024 isn’t the only NCES study that collects data from teachers (and school administrators); information on teacher characteristics such as race/ethnicity, educational background, and gender is provided by school and teacher respondents in numerous NCES studies, just as they are by our ECLS-K:2024 respondents. For instance, while we learned about kindergartners’ teachers in the 2010-11 school year from the ECLS-K:2024’s sister study, the ECLS-K:2011, we learned more about teachers of all elementary and secondary grades from the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) in the 2011-12 school year, one year after the ECLS-K:2011 kindergarten teacher data were collected. For example, from SASS we know that in 2011-12, of all public elementary and secondary school teachers, 4 percent had less than a Bachelor’s degree, 40 percent had a Bachelor’s degree, 48 percent had a Master’s degree, 8 percent had an Education Specialist degree, and 1 percent had a Doctoral degree. Male public school teachers made up 24 percent of teachers in 2011–12, whereas females made up 76 percent of teachers.

We’ll know even more about America’s educators with the release of the ECLS-K:2024 kindergarten data, as the study is nationally representative of kindergarten teachers during the 2023-24 school year.  We haven’t had a nationally representative sample of teachers in an ECLS program study since the ECLS-K’s 1998-99 collection, so the ECLS team and all of those who rely on our data are very excited about our upcoming data release! Our teacher data will allow the public, including scholars, educators, and local and federal governments to better understand how our current American educational policies impact teachers, and the differences in the kindergarten teacher population 25 years apart.

Not to be forgotten, the ECLS-K:2024 2023-24 data are also nationally representative of schools that educated kindergartners in that school year.  We can’t wait to see how schools today compare to the schools educating kindergartners in 1998–99 and 2010–11.  
We receive all our valuable school and teacher data from our participating ECLS-K:2024 school administrators and teachers; a huge thank you to you all!
 
Want to learn more?  

• Check out this brief video about the ECLS program.
• Read up on the ECLS-K:2024 on NCES’s ECLS website or our ECLS website for study participants.
• Find resources for parents, teachers, and school administrators that use ECLS and other NCES data in our ECLS newsletters.
• Find other ECLS posts on the NCES Blog.
• Sign up for the NCES Newsflash.
• Follow NCES on LinkedIn, X, and Facebook.

This wraps up our 2024 blog series on celebrating ECLS-K:2024, but we’ll be back with future blogs with information on the ECLS program and upcoming data releases in the coming years.  In the meantime, feel free to reach out to the ECLS study team at ECLS@ed.gov with any questions or comments. We’d love to hear from you!

By Korrie Johnson and Jill Carlivati McCarroll, NCES

The U.S. Department of Education’s ten Regional Educational Labs (RELs) partner with states, districts, and education service agencies to create and support the use of evidence by educators and administrators. RELs provide a wide variety of direct services to our partners, including evidence- or research-focused training, coaching, technical support, and applied research. 

RELs also create free, user-friendly tools and resources that any state, district, education service agency, or other support provider can use so that the learnings from direct REL services can be shared nationwide. Below, we share a sampling of products across key topic areas. Visit our website to access our full library of over 2,000 tools, resources, and studies.

Literacy

A Practitioner’s Guide to Improving Literacy Outcomes for Students by Using Evidence to Strengthen Programs and Practices (IES, 2024)

This resource was developed to help state and local education agencies implement evidence-based literacy practices in their classrooms. It is based on the U.S. Department of Education’s Non-Regulatory Guidance for using evidence to improve teaching and learning that includes a five-step, continuous improvement cycle. Each step includes freely available, high-quality literacy resources.

Empowering Young Readers by Using Assessment Data to Inform Evidence-Based Word Reading Skill Instruction (REL Midwest, 2024)

This resource features a set of flowcharts that can help K-2 educators identify student skill reading needs in phonological awareness, phonics, and fluency based on universal screening data. Once the needs are identified, the flowcharts direct educators toward evidence-based instructional practices that can be used to provide reading acceleration targeted to student needs. 

Professional Learning Community: Emergent Literacy (REL Southeast, 2020)

This resource supports preschool teachers through collaborative learning experiences in a professional learning community (PLC). Preschool teachers who participate in this PLC will learn evidence-based instructional practices that can enhance their emergent literacy instruction and benefit their students.

Teacher’s Guide to Supporting Family Involvement in Foundational Reading Skills (REL Southeast)

This is a companion to the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) practice guide, Foundational Skills to Support Reading for Understanding in Kindergarten through 3rd Grade. This guide is organized according to the four recommendations and how-to steps from the WWC practice guide. The activities follow the typical developmental progression through which students learn to read. While teachers may use the guide sequentially, the activities are designed to be used flexibly. Teachers can select activities to share with families based on each student’s instructional needs. 

• A Kindergarten Teacher’s Guide to Supporting Family Involvement in Foundational Reading Skills (REL Southeast, 2020) 
• A First Grade Teacher’s Guide to Supporting Family Involvement in Foundational Reading Skills (REL Southeast, 2020) 
• A Second Grade Teacher’s Guide to Supporting Family Involvement in Foundational Reading Skills (REL Southeast, 2021) 
• A Third-Grade Teacher’s Guide to Supporting Family Involvement in Foundational Reading Skills (REL Southeast, 2021)

STEM

Community Math Night Facilitators’ Toolkit (REL Appalachia, 2021)

REL Appalachia created the Community Math Night Facilitators’ Toolkit as a detailed resource for K–5 elementary school educators to plan and implement a Community Math Night event. Community Math Nights use research-based, interactive math activities to engage families in building positive math attitudes, facilitate their participation in children’s math learning, and build a community of educators, students, families, and other caring adults to support students. 

Professional Learning Community: Improving Mathematical Problem Solving for Students in Grades 4 through 8 (REL Southeast, 2019)

REL Southeast developed this facilitator’s guide on the topic of mathematical problem solving for use in professional learning community settings. The facilitator’s guide is a set of professional development materials designed to supplement the What Works Clearinghouse practice guide, Improving Mathematical Problem Solving in Grades 4 Through 8. 

How Educators and Caregivers Can Create Supportive Conditions for Success in PreK-12 Mathematics (REL Program, 2023)

This infographic includes freely-available, evidence-based resources from across the REL program that all educators can use immediately to promote supportive math learning both in school and in partnership with families and caregivers in the community.

Multilingualism

Supporting Integrated English Learner Student Instruction – A Guide to Assess Professional Learning Needs (REL West, 2021)

REL West and the Region 15 Comprehensive Center developed a guide to assess teacher professional learning needs to implement research-based recommendations for the instruction of elementary-grade English learner students. 

Welcoming, Registering, and Supporting Newcomer Students: A Toolkit for Educators of Immigrant and Refugee Students in Secondary Schools (REL Northwest, 2021)

This resource toolkit is intended to help educators and other stakeholders identify and use research-based practices, policies, and procedures for welcoming, registering, and supporting newcomer immigrant and refugee students who are attending secondary schools (grades 6-12) in the United States. Resources include professional development curricula, policy and implementation guides, evaluation reports, and sample surveys and assessments.

Professional Learning Communities Facilitator’s Guide for the What Works Clearinghouse Practice Guide Teaching Academic Content and Literacy to English Learners in Elementary and Middle School (REL Southwest, 2015)

This facilitator’s guide is designed to assist professional learning communities (PLCs) in applying evidence-based strategies to help K-8 English learners acquire the language and literacy skills needed to succeed academically. 

Resources for Determining Special Education Eligibility of English Learners (REL Northeast & Islands, 2021)

The resources provided on this page can be used by teachers and administrators working with English learners both to provide high-quality instruction and to build practices to better determine special education eligibility. 

Teacher Workforce

Automated Teacher Diversity District Tool (REL Mid-Atlantic, 2020)

This tool is designed to help state education agency staff support districts in identifying gaps in the diversity of their teacher workforces. The automated tool generates district-level reports that provide the racial/ethnic make-up of a district’s student and teacher populations and its three- and five-year teacher retention rates by race and ethnicity. The template can be used to prepare reports for any number of districts. Inputting the data could take as little as 30 minutes if the data are readily available. After gathering and entering the necessary data, the tool takes one to two minutes to generate district reports.

How to Grow Teacher Wellbeing in Your Schools (REL Pacific, 2020)

The social, emotional, and physical health of teachers is a shared responsibility and a critical component of student learning and overall community wellbeing. Check out this infographic to learn more about why teacher wellbeing matters and how to support it in your school.

Lessons From Stay Interviews of Early Career Teachers in Four Utah School Districts (REL West, 2024)

This resource is an overview of local teacher attrition rates and exit survey results as well as national survey data on teacher well-being and research on new teacher induction and mentoring as part of the Utah Early Career Teacher Retention (U-ECTR) partnership. The partnership is dedicated to understanding and addressing the root causes of early career attrition.

In September of this year, the School Pulse Panel (SPP), NCES’s innovative approach to delivering timely information on public K-12 schools in the U.S., surveyed around 1,500 school leaders on their school’s plans to incorporate the 2024 national election into lessons and whether they planned to run any election-related activities such as mock debates or mock voting. While schools were not asked what type of content was included in these lessons or in the election-related activities, the findings presented here show the prevalence of election-related information and engagement opportunities in the nation’s public schools.

Figure 1 shows the percentage of schools that reported that teachers were incorporating the 2024 national election into their lessons, for each of the respective grades. More than half of public schools reported that teachers were incorporating the national election into their lessons at fourth and higher grades, peaking at twelfth grade (85 percent). 

Figure 1. Percentage of public schools that had at least one teacher incorporating the 2024 national election cycle into lessons, by grade, 2024-25 school year

Overall, 77 percent of public schools reported that they had teachers incorporating the election into their lessons. There was some regional variation in the percentage of schools that reported teachers incorporating the election, with higher percentages of public schools in the Northeast (82 percent) and Midwest (82 percent) incorporating the election compared to schools in the South (75 percent) and West (74 percent).

In addition to lessons, school leaders reported on various special programming activities centered around the 2024 election. Overall, 52 percent of public schools reported having one or more of the following: voter registration opportunities for students ¹, mock debates, mock voting, assemblies/guest speakers, or some other program related to the election. As seen in Figure 2, a higher percentage of high/secondary schools reported running these kinds of programs, compared to elementary or middle/combined schools. Table 1 shows the percentages of schools offering each of these programs for all public schools and by school level.

Figure 2. Percentage of public schools with any special programming around the 2024 national election cycle, by school level, 2024-25 school year

Table 1. Percentage of public schools with selected special programming activities around the 2024 national election cycle, by school level, 2024-25 school year

^a Only asked of schools serving 11^th- or 12^th- grade students.

‡ Reporting standards not met. The coefficient of variation is greater than 50 percent or there are too few cases for a reliable analysis.

Among public schools enrolling students in 11^th- or 12^th- grade, 66 percent reported that they held voter registration opportunities for their students. Figure 3 shows the variation in the percentage of schools that offered registration opportunities by school neighborhood poverty level, percent students of color, school size, school locale, and region. Among different school sizes, a lower percentage of the smallest schools in the country (0-299 students) held voter registration events for their students, compared to all other school size groups. Among regions, a higher percentage of schools in the Northeast reported providing these opportunities, compared to the Midwest and West.

Figure 3. Among public schools enrolling students in 11^th- or 12^th- grade, percentage that had voter registration opportunities for their students, by school characteristics, 2024-25 school year

To explore these data – for all public schools and by neighborhood poverty level, percent students of color, school level, school size, locale, and region – check out the interactive SPP dashboard.

[1]Only among schools serving 11^th- or 12^th- grade students.

The U.S. Department of Education and IES’s Small Business Innovation Research program (ED/IES SBIR) funds entrepreneurial developers and research partners to create the next generation of education technology products for students, teachers, and administrators. The program emphasizes an iterative research and development process and pilot studies to evaluate the feasibility, usability, and promise of new products to improve education outcomes. The program also focuses on commercialization after development is complete so that the products can be disseminated and be sustained over time. Each year, millions of students in thousands of schools around the country use ED/IES SBIR products.

The ED/IES SBIR 2025 Program Is Now OPEN

On Friday, November 8, 2025, ED/IES SBIR released three FY2025 program solicitations, including:

• The Phase IA solicitation requests proposals for the development of prototypes of novel education technology products where no or limited previous research and development has already occurred.
• The Phase IB solicitation requests proposals for the development of a new component to be added to an existing research-based education technology prototype or product.
• The Direct to Phase II solicitation requests proposals for the development of new education technology products to ready evidence-based innovations for use at scale. Researcher(s) at a university or non-profit education organization must have created the existing evidence-based innovation.

The proposal submission date and time is January 8, 2025 at 11AM EST. See this website page for more information and for URL links to download each solicitation on SAM.gov.   

ED/IES SBIR Recaps its 2024 Awards

For FY2024, ED/IES SBIR made 23 SBIR awards, 12 Phase I, 8 Phase II, and 3 Direct to Phase II projects. Phase I projects ($250,000 over 8 months) include development and evaluation of a new prototype. Phase I awardees will be eligible to apply for a Phase II award in FY 2025. Phase II projects ($1M over 2 years) include full scale development and evaluation of new products initially developed with FY 2023 Phase I awards. Direct to Phase II projects ($1M over 2 years) occur without a prior Phase I award and focus on the development and evaluation of new products to prepare existing researcher-developed evidence-based innovations for use at scale. Watch short videos with more information about the ED/IES SBIR 2024 Phase II and Direct to Phase II projects here.

The FY 2024 ED/IES SBIR awards highlight trends in the field of education technology.

Trend 1: Using artificial intelligence to personalize learning and generate insights to inform tailored instruction. About half of the new projects are developing artificial intelligence (AI) based software components to personalize learning and instruction. These projects take advantage of AI functionalities to generate new or adjust existing content to meet the needs of individual learners, offer real-time feedback to scaffold learning, and produce real-time prompts and insights that educators can use to track student progress and adjust instruction accordingly.

• In the area of English language arts, Kibeam Learning, Inc. (formerly Kinoo, Inc) will support children as they independently explore and read books; Common Ground Publishing , LLC will support student writing; RapStudy Inc. will create songs with customized lyrics for academic learning; and with two new Phase I awards, Charmtech Labs LLC will develop two new prototypes, one to add items for an existing reading assessment (ReadBasix) and another to create new localized and culturally responsive assessment items to measure reading and inform instruction.
• For English learners, StoryWorld International Corp will personalize vocabulary acquisition, and Linguistic Inc will generate vocational resources for adult English learners.
• In math, Inletech LLC will allow students to create personalized stories to explore and learn math in a simulated real-world context, and Oko Labs, Inc. will engage students in a collaborative process to solve puzzles by doing math.
• For social, behavioral, and mental health, Edifii, Inc will develop a chatbot to provide guidance counselors insights on how individual students are planning for their future, and Sown to Grow, Inc. will create a logic-based algorithm to identify students at risk for mental health challenges and inform intervention.

Trend 2: Engaging students through games, interactive and hands-on activities, and collaborative learning. Projects are designing innovative learning technologies to engage students through pedagogies employing game-based, collaborative learning, and hands-on activities.

• Several awardees will develop hybrid online and in-person collaborative games, including Liminal Esports LLC (doing business as Snowbright Studio), Alterea, Inc., INFINID LEARNING INC (doing business as Mission.io), and Makefully LLC, for topics in social studies, and Immersed Games Inc and dfusion Inc. for topics in mathematics.
• In music education, Edify Technologies, Inc is developing an interactive app for K to 2 students.
• For computer science, Chibitronics Inc will develop a physical and digital circuitry toolkit.
• In the area of study skills and social emotional learning, ZenStudy LLC will develop a multi-media platform with strategies for college students to be successful.

Trend 3: Advancing research to practice at scale through education technology. Three Direct to Phase II awards will ready existing evidence-based innovations for use at scale through the development of new education technology products.

• FigStar Learning will develop a new professional learning management system to ready a prior IES-supported professional development program for use at scale to support children who are English Learners.
• Graspable Inc will develop new functionalities to scale a prior IES-supported math game.
• Nimble Hiring, PBC. will develop a dashboard to provide real-time insights to administrators to inform teacher hiring decisions using a model developed in prior IES-funded research.

Stay tuned for updates on Facebook and LinkedIn as IES continues to support innovative forms of technology.

Edward Metz (Edward.Metz@ed.gov) is the program manager of the ED/IES SBIR program.

Laurie Hobbs (Laurie.Hobbs@ed.gov) is the program analyst of the ED/IES SBIR program.