Fall Updates: AC Dashboards and Surveys

by Nina L. Kumar

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Posted on September 14, 2020

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Continually informed by cutting-edge science, we’ve made several improvements to our dashboards and to all surveys, incorporating what we learned from over 70 schools assessed for students’ and adults’ resilience during distance learning. With the updated dashboards, users will be able to explore more granular data on at-risk students; compare their school's results to different sets of norms; and illuminate still more specific, actionable intervention directions. Multiple refinements have also been incorporated in our three Fall 2020 Survey offerings: Two student surveys, the long-form High Achieving Schools Survey (HASS) and the short-form Student Resilience Survey (SRS), and one survey for faculty and staff, the Faculty Resilience Survey (FRS). Please read on to see details of these changes.

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What's New?

2020 Dashboards

In our interactive dashboards that present findings for each school, we’ve added two new filtering features to allow users to dig even deeper. We’ve also updated our norms to include all 15,000 students and 3,500 faculty / staff who completed our surveys since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

• Additional Filtering Options
• We’re excited to share that dashboard users will now have an additional option for viewing data by particular demographic subgroups. Prior to this release, users could filter data separately by one demographic variable at a time, such as by grade, gender, or ethnicity, among other custom demographic variables. With the Fall 2020 update, dashboard users now have the power to examine two filters at a time (e.g., looking at grade level breakdowns among female students). This new option to filter by two demographic variables will allow users to identify and help students and staff in need with even more precision than before.

• Additional Norm Options
• In the past, users have been able to view their data relative to national norms. With our updated dashboards, users can view their own data not only in relation to national norms, but also, relative to schools in their geographic region, and to their type of school or population served (e.g., boarding schools, single-sex schools).

• Updated HAS Averages
• AC has surveyed 15,000 students and 3,500 adults since the pandemic began. Our updated norms make it possible for schools to gauge community well-being relative to others, using large and scientifically valid databases that incorporate overall shifts in well-being that have occurred since the start of distance learning.

All Fall 2020 Surveys

• Free Response Questions
• Supplementing our existing, empirically validated quantitative measures, we now have open-ended questions in our student and faculty surveys that provide rich data on feelings, concerns, and suggestions about experiences at school. We have also developed sophisticated coding taxonomies to analyze and classify top themes emerging from participants’ responses. Dashboards show the relative frequency with which different themes are mentioned, and will also allow users to read individual, anonymized responses within each theme category. Participants’ free responses can also be filtered down to view them by subgroups in schools, just like the quantitative scores. Data from these qualitative questions provide valuable insights to supplement comprehensive quantitative findings, allowing leaders to directly hear the voices of all their community members.

• Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
• To ensure that we're providing our partner schools with the most up-to-date surveys on issues related to school climate, we have developed new items to address the following constructs: Equity & Inclusion, Respect for Diversity, and Openness to Diverse Perspectives (e.g., on social issues). Responses within these three dimensions will give administrators detailed understanding of student and staff perceptions of diversity, equity, and inclusion at school, and specific areas that might need attention.

• COVID-19: Returning to School (Health and Safety)
• In response to the novel challenges resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, we've added several new questions on physical safety. For example, administrators will get insights into student and staff views about the use of masks and social distancing, as appropriate, in returning to in-person schooling.

• Brevity
• To optimize the user experience for all survey respondents, we conducted thorough analyses of existing data to shorten our existing measures, keeping only the most reliable and predictive items. Even with the addition of open-ended questions, therefore, our Fall 2020 surveys will be more time-efficient than previous versions.

• Refinements in questions on the Faculty Resilience Survey, by role at school
• To ensure that all adults of a school community feel included and heard, on our faculty and staff survey we have integrated advanced skip logic to collect targeted responses from faculty and staff based on their respective roles at school. Questions about instruction and learning will only be assessed among respondents who indicate they hold a teaching role at school.

Under Development

• Children’s Resilience Survey
• We are excited to share that we are finalizing an adapted version of our Student Resilience Survey designed to be developmentally-appropriate for students in grades 2-5. Stay tuned for updates on the release date!

• Parent Resilience Survey
• This past spring, we developed a survey to assess parent well-being and modifiable aspects of school climate that can be changed to improve school experiences for parents. More information will be available soon!

We would like to extend a sincere thank you to the partnering schools who helped us identify these areas for change and improvement. Your help truly enables us to better serve our communities!

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