The Beginning School Study, 1982-2002

The Beginning School Study (BSS) is a longitudinal study of children's academic and social development beginning in first grade and continuing through high school and beyond. This 20-year study, begun in 1982, contains data from a panel of children in Baltimore City Public Schools (BCPS), and also includes data from their parents, teachers, and schools. The investigators' purpose was to observe how a group of typical urban school children negotiated the beginning school transition and, by monitoring the same participants over time, to explore links to later trajectories of personal and academic development. Retention and dropout, how patterns in the early grades play out over the longer term, and how seasonal learning patterns(school year vs summer), family structure and work outside school might affect progress in elementary and middle school were several foci of the study. An overriding goal of the researchers was to identify sources of resilience in the participants' lives that enabled many of them to overcome the effects of poverty and other conditions to finish school or training programs, to find their way to steady work with good prospects, to enter into satisfying and stable relationships, to avoid substance abuse, to stay out of trouble with the law, and to attain a sense of personal satisfaction or fulfillment with how their lives have unfolded. A two-stage stratified, random sample consisted of 838 public school students beginning first grade in Baltimore, MD city public schools. First, a sample of twenty schools, stratified by racial mix and socioeconomic status was selected. Second, within each school, students were randomly sampled from every first-grade classroom. The result was a panel of 226 African American females, 193 White females, 235 African American males and 184 White males. All children attended schools with the same basic curriculum, taught by teachers on the same salary scale. Their records were kept in the same manner, and they had similar standardized tests and other evaluations at the same points in time. The data were collected by face-to-face interviews with students and by self-administered questionnaires with parents. Teachers responded to questionnaires, and school records were examined for data on marks, test scores and the like. In later years, most of the parent questionnaires were answered by mail or by phone. A broad spectrum of outcomes has been measured: school achievement (based on standardized test scores and grades given by teachers), students' own expectations, self-esteem, locus of control, and other non-cognitive characteristics. As participants left middle childhood, moved through early and later adolescence, and entered young adulthood, measures of dating behavior, vocational planning, substance use and many other adolescence topics were added to the collection. A Young Adult Survey, administered between 1998 and early 2002, gathered detailed work and education histories as well as data on personal relationships, marital status, and parenthood. Contextual data from families and schools were collected. School and neighborhood data include racial mix, classroom-grouping practices, socioeconomic level, and other related areas. Most years, teachers provided information on grading standards, feelings about their jobs and schools, their expectations for the performance of individual children in their classes, ratings of children's personal traits (for example, aggressiveness), grouping practices, and so on. Parents of the participants informed the researchers about family structure and family changes, their occupations, education, and the like as well as expectations for their child's schooling and school performance, their feelings about the school, and their understanding of its evaluation procedures. The Murray Archive holds machine-readable data from Waves 1 to 8 for all study participants, as well as the qualitative data transcripts.