Highlighted Features Background on tool Practical suggestions   for use How to report results Using surveys for   school-improvement   planning User's experiences Sample survey items Method "Homegrown" written questionnaire, administered in 20 minutes; follow-up student focus groups

Respondents High school students Developer Concord High School with University of California at Davis Cost Will vary: includes reproduction, scoring, and data analysis. Permissions Tool users have permission to duplicate the survey.

THE TOOL:
Measuring School Climate for Students: Concord High School
Concord High's 48-item student questionnaire

Students can provide essential information about school climate. According to Eric Schaps, president of the Developmental Studies Center in Oakland, California, "We worry about what’s being taught in the way of curriculum, standards, and incentives, and we worry even more about what comes out, how students score and perform. But we virtually ignore their thoughts and feelings about school.

There is compelling evidence showing that students’ experience of school shapes their attitudes and behavior, which in turn determine whether the school environment will be conducive to learning." (Schaps 1998)

The "homegrown" climate survey we highlight here is one school’s attempt to assess students’ perceptions about and their feelings of connection to the school. If you find the instrument and survey methodology match your school’s needs, you can reproduce and use the questionnaire, adapt it, or glean ideas from it for your own homegrown survey.

Tool Development and Specifications
In partnership with the University of California at Davis, Concord High School, located in central Contra Costa County, California, developed a questionnaire to better understand students’ experience in the school. Suburban Concord High School, serving approximately 1,450 students and with a staff of 130, had some concerns about its climate. Despite many academic successes at the school, an unacceptably high percentage of freshmen were not staying and graduating from the school. The questionnaire addresses how students feel about themselves at school, how students view the school climate, and how students assess the academic practices at the school.

A little background about the school will help to explain the development of their survey design. Concord High School, one of six comprehensive high schools in the Mt. Diablo School District, contains two separate schools – the Partnership Academy and the regular school program. About one third of the students attend the Academy and two thirds the regular program. The Partnership Academy, funded by the State Department of Education and supported by UC Davis, serves at-risk students who have been in trouble. A substantial number of students in the regular program at Concord High School are also considered at risk. Despite similar academic populations, the Academy had a much higher retention-through-graduation rate than the regular school. Many students in the regular program chose to attend other schools in the district or dropped out entirely.

An analysis of the outcome data and program structures of the two programs suggested that student connectedness was a major factor in students’ decisions about staying in school. This sense of connection to the school appeared to be fostered in part by the smaller groupings or clusters at the Academy. Based on this insight, Concord immediately instituted smaller clusters for all ninth-graders in the regular school and developed plans to extend the clusters to the tenth-grade. They also created career-path groupings in the eleventh and twelfth.

Concord’s desire to measure how connected their students felt to the school led them to create, in partnership with UC Davis, a 48-item student questionnaire. The questionnaire measures three essential aspects of student life – cognitive, affective, and social – that Concord believes indicate the degree to which students feel a part of the school community.

The questionnaire includes at least eight questions for each of the three aspects. Some of the questions are repeated in the inverse to increase the validity of the results. The survey items use a four-point scale for responses so that students cannot merely mark the middle rating for convenience. In addition, it takes only twenty minutes to complete the form, a time span short enough for students to maintain focus and attention.

The questionnaire was designed to be administered twice yearly for at least three years – the interval required to track ninth-grade students through high school graduation. Through this questionnaire, Concord can track student perceptions of and connectedness to the school. Then the school can determine whether the cluster structure has contributed to the changes. The broader survey design, described in the next section, serves their goal of including the voice of students in their school change efforts.

Operator’s Manual
If you wish to use this survey approach, Concord offers four suggestions:

• Locate scoring equipment and compatible answer sheets early in the process.
  
  
• Administer the questionnaires during homeroom in order to engage more teachers in your schoolwide evaluation process.
  
  
• Find a way to survey students who were absent, especially if your school is interested in students who might drop out of school.
  
  
• Examine the survey data with someone who has expertise in designing surveys. Doing so prevented Concord from being misled by the data; for example, their UC Davis partners pointed out that questionnaire items left unanswered may have been confusing to students and could be altered for the next administration. In addition, the partnership helped the larger faculty better understand the entire survey method.

The staff reported two important outcomes of the exercise. Students became aware of the faculty’s interest in their opinions and concerns about their success and they appreciated the opportunity to be heard. Students also showed more interest in the school; over 70 percent of the students who attended the student assembly signed up to continue working to improve Concord High School. end text begin subheadings

User’s View
end subheadings begin text Examining the surveys as a staff led to many changes in Concord High School and to a resurgence of energy and optimism. Several comments from members of the school improvement team demonstrate the power of using data for decisionmaking.

Teacher Carol Noble points out, "We won’t know if creating smaller clusters within the larger school has made a difference in student attitudes towards school until we examine the surveys six months from now. It will be several years before the data we collect show whether students have stayed in our school. For now, we know that we collaborate more, and talk more, because we now have a common prep period. We will have to see how all of this influences graduation rates and student achievement."

Shirley Bhatt, another member of the school improvement team, seconds Noble’s observations of change, "We can already see that because they are working with fewer students, teachers are able to catch problems quicker. We can identify students who are emotionally upset sooner. In the past, it would have taken weeks to identify a student with a problem. Each of us would have asked each other what we thought was wrong with the particular student. We would have gone around in circles."

Bonnie Warner, the principal who got the survey process under way, is excited about the prospect of creating a "small-school sense of belonging" in a larger school setting. She says, "We must make school more relevant for kids and work to build a learning community." With this goal in mind, Concord is dividing into clusters in both the ninth- and tenth-grades and career-path clusters in the eleventh- and twelfth-grades. begin subheadings

Citations
end subheadings begin text Schaps, Ed. (1998, April 1). "Commentary: How Students Experience Their Schools." Education Week. end text begin subheadings

Resources
end subheadings begin text The Developmental Studies Center
2000 Embarcadero, Suite 305
Oakland, CA 94606-5300
510 533-0213
FAX 510 464-3670
Web: http://www.devstu.org

This school-support organization has developed several student questionnaires and surveys that measure student development in the social and ethical domains and students’ experience of school. They have also developed a classroom observation procedure.