Spring 2021 Dashboards Update
by Nina Kumar
Posted on March 8, 2021
Authentic Connections empowers schools with the data they need to improve their community’s well-being, and helps schools celebrate their successes. With an eye towards constant learning, reflection, and improvement, twice a year we update our survey questions and results dashboards to ensure that our partner schools find the insights we provide as relevant and useful as possible. Given the unpredictability caused by the pandemic, adaptability to the ever-changing environment has never been more important.
For our most recent round of improvements, we’ve focused on updating our results dashboards to be easier to understand, share, and discuss with all members of the school community– including students, parents, and faculty/staff– in conversations around well-being. Please read on to see details of these exciting changes.
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What's New?
We have updated our interactive results dashboards to make them easier to understand, share, and discuss with all members of the school community. Based on valuable feedback from our partner schools, we’ve added several new features:
- Updated Executive Summary Views
- To help schools disseminate survey results to the broader school community, we’ve created comprehensive yet clear executive summary views highlighting key survey findings that can be easily shared in presentations, newsletters, blog posts, and website features. The executive summaries distill rigorous statistical analyses of survey data into simple and attractive visualizations that clearly communicate what the school is doing well in supporting the mental health of students and faculty/staff, identify recommended areas for additional focus, and present verbatim responses on how students and employees are doing in their own words. The improved executive summary views make it simple for school leaders to begin conversations about well-being and mental health with students, families, and employees.
- New Metric: Changes in Free-Response Data Over Time
- Open-ended questions were a powerful addition to our surveys over the past year, providing rich information on student and faculty/staff well-being and allowing them to share their thoughts and concerns in their own words. With our latest release, we’re going a step further by showcasing how responses to open-ended questions have changed over time: schools will be able to view the most frequently mentioned response themes for each survey administration and follow changes over time. This new feature provides another metric to gauge the changing landscape around community well-being and ensure that interventions are targeting the most pressing needs.
- Updated Averages and Comparison Samples
- Our results dashboards allow users to compare their results to updated average scores from a normative sample consisting of ~23,000 students and ~6,000 adults across the U.S. that we have surveyed since the COVID-19 pandemic began in March 2020. Our updated norms make it possible for schools to gauge community well-being relative to other schools using large and scientifically-valid databases that incorporate overall shifts in well-being that have occurred since the pandemic began. Additionally, since our Fall 2020 release, dashboard users have the option to choose to which group they’d like to compare their data: with a national sample of all respondents across the U.S. or a regional sample of similar schools in the immediate area, similar schools based on type (e.g., Independent schools, Boarding schools, Public schools), or by population served (e.g., all genders vs single-gender).
All of the updates that we make to our surveys and dashboards reflect the invaluable feedback that we’ve received from our partner schools. Thank you to all of our colleagues for your dedication to supporting your community’s health and happiness. If you have any thoughts or ideas on what you’d like to see us do next,
please email us.
Want to know more about the updates we made last fall?
Read the Fall 2020 Updates →
