User Benefits
In a school or district striving to maintain success, stakeholders need to have a clear picture of current needs and a plan for designing improvements. School improvement leaders and teachers use perceptions data to learn about current strengths and needs from staff, students, parents, and various community members. Perceptions data is most effective when used in conjunction with other types of data to guide school and community leaders to the most complete and effective means of achieving and sustaining improvement efforts.
To collect perceptions data, it is necessary to have an easy-to-use method to gather information from large numbers of various stakeholders. The Characteristics of Successful Schools Survey tool will help collect and analyze perceptions data quickly and easily to facilitate the data-driven decision-making process by capturing information for use by educational leadership and school improvement teams.
As an element of a recurrent and intentional use of data, perceptions data can:
- Advise leadership about the opinions and thoughts of school and community stakeholders for use in evaluating overall climate.
- Inform the process of analyzing achievement and other types of data for a complete look at the school or district.
- Build relationships with the community which fosters a loyalty to the school.
- Assess longitudinal progress for implemented strategies.
- Contribute to a richer picture of the actual and perceived classroom climate.
- Influence how content is taught to students.
- Affect how communication is approached with the different stakeholders.
- Impact strategies implemented to improve the classroom environment.
