Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey (FACES) [electronic resource] 2009 Cohort [United States] United States Department of Health and Human Services. Administration for Children and Families. Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation

2018-07-26

Ann Arbor, Mich. Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor] 2013

1 online resource

Numeric

The Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey (FACES) is a periodic, ongoing longitudinal study of program performance. Successive nationally representative samples of Head Start children, their families, classrooms, and programs provide descriptive information on the population of children and families served; staff qualifications, credentials, and opinions; Head Start classroom practices and quality measures; and child and family outcomes. FACES includes a battery of child assessments across multiple developmental domains (cognitive, social, emotional, and physical). FACES 2009 is the latest FACES cohort study and followed children from Head Start entry in fall 2009 through one or two years of program participation and to kindergarten. For nearly a decade, the Office of Head Start, the Administration for Children and Families, other federal agencies, local programs, and the public have depended on FACES for valid and reliable national information on (1) the skills and abilities of Head Start children, (2) how Head Start children's skills and abilities compare with preschool children nationally, (3) Head Start children's readiness for and subsequent performance in kindergarten, and (4) the characteristics of the children's home and classroom environments. The FACES study is designed to enable researchers to answer a wide range of research questions that are crucial for aiding program managers and policymakers. Some of the questions that are central to FACES include: <list type="ordered"> <itm>What are the demographic characteristics of the population of children and families served by Head Start? How has the population served by Head Start changed?</itm> <itm>What are the experiences of families and children in the Head Start program? How have they changed?</itm> <itm>What are the cognitive and social skills of Head Start children at the beginning and end of their first year in the program? Has Head Start program performance improved over time?</itm> <itm>Do the gains in cognitive and social skills that Head Start children achieve carry over into kindergarten? Do larger gains (or greater declines in problem behavior) translate into higher achievement at the end of kindergarten?</itm> <itm>What are the qualifications of Head Start teachers in terms of education, experience, and credentials? Are average teacher education levels rising in Head Start?</itm> <itm>What is the observed quality of Head Start classrooms as early learning environments, including the level and range of teaching and interactions, provisions for learning, emotional and instructional support, and classroom organization? How has quality changed over time? What program- and classroom-level factors are related to observed classroom quality? How is observed quality related to children's outcomes and developmental gains?</itm></list> In response to recent trends and mandates, FACES 2009 expanded the information collected on families and children who speak a primary language other than English and the information collected on children who are homeless. Earlier cohorts of FACES gathered information on the languages spoken in the home and used for classroom instruction. Given the growth in the population of Hispanic/Latino preschoolers (Hernandez 2006), FACES 2009 placed additional emphasis on Dual Language Learners (DLLs). In addition, given the 2007 Head Start Act's focus on children and families who are homeless, FACES 2009 expanded coverage on the enrollment of such children, how the program ensures that they enroll in Head Start, and the special services available to such children and their families. FACES 2009 carefully balanced the need for consistent measurement of outcomes against the need for improvements in instrumentation and techniques. In some instances, new instruments were added to obtain more comprehensive information on Head Start children. For example, the Expressive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test was added to assess children's expressive language, which is related to later reading achievement even more so than receptive language (National Early Literacy Panel 2008). A measure of phonemic awareness from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort (ECLS-B) preschool wave was also added to assess children's knowledge of beginning and ending sounds in words. Further, FACES 2009 included a direct assessment of executive functioning-a pencil tapping task to examine children's inhibitory control, working memory, and attention-which has been shown to relate to young children's development in mathematics, vocabulary, and literacy (Blair and Razza 2007; Espy et al. 2004; McClelland et al. 2007). The User Guide provides detailed information about the FACES 2009 study design, execution, and data to inform and assist researchers who may be interested in using the data for future analyses. The following items are provided in the User Guide as appendices. <list type="bulleted"> <itm>Appendix A - Copyright statements</itm> <itm>Appendix B - Instrument Content Matrices</itm> <itm>Appendix C - Questionnaires</itm> <itm>Appendix D - Center/Program Codebook</itm> <itm>Appendix E - Classroom/Teacher Codebook</itm> <itm>Appendix F - Child Codebook</itm> <itm>Appendix G - Description of Constructed/Derived Variables</itm></list>Cf: http://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR34558.v3

Also available as downloadable files.

Data Sets / Online

English

June 17, 2019

Data sets.