How surveys can contribute to improving schools’ community well-being

Since 2020, remote learning has been one of the biggest challenges for schools, parents and pupils. Instead of being an option, it became mandatory for most of last year. Consequently, schools had to quickly adapt and find ways to implement the best remote learning experience possible.

According to Edurio, a start-up focused on research in education, one way to improve your school community’s well-being is to understand better how pupils, parents, and staff think and feel about remote learning. There has never been a better time to focus on ameliorating delivering a certain standard of remote education. Watch their full Webinar at the video below:

Surveys are an efficient method to focus on the people behind your school community. It makes parents, staff and pupils feel their opinion matters and that they are contributing to improve a community they are part of.

To ensure a survey’s learning outcome, the attention should be on individual lived experiences. This is why research design is essential to producing reliable data that will directly help you think of strategies to improve the well-being of everyone involved in the school.

To get resourceful data that will help you understand what needs to be improved, you need to ask questions people know how to answer. The trick is to put yourself in the place of the stakeholders instead of trying to grab the most information possible. Asking how people feel about certain subjects, for example, will guide their understanding of the purpose or the reason behind the survey, which could encourage the level of their participation engagement.

Another point to consider is that the questions are only half of a survey. Response options are as important as the questions themselves. Not having appropriate answer choices can reduce the value of the data you get in the end. For respondents to pick the best option that describes their thoughts and feelings, the answers need to offer an appropriate scale of options connected explicitly to the type of question.

If you would like to know more about improving your school community experience with surveys, download Edurio’s guide for using non-academic data for education policymakers and school leaders.