Education Week - January 16, 2013 - 10

EDUCATION WEEK

JANUARY 16, 2013

www.edweek.org

Survey Tool Aims for Fresh Eye on Parents
By Michele Molnar
A new survey tool that school
districts and parent-teacher organizations can use to measure
the quality of parent-school relationships has been created by
the Harvard Graduate School of
Education and released by SurveyMonkey, a Palo Alto, Calif.,
company, for widespread use
by schools, districts, and parent
groups.
The 71-item “question bank”
covers seven areas of family engagement—from how much help
students receive at home to how
confident parents are in supporting their child’s schooling.
Districts can adapt the survey to
suit their individual needs, and
parents responding to it can do so
online or on paper.
After introducing the survey
last May, SurveyMonkey is working directly with 12 early-adopting districts on its deployment,
and others are finding out about
it online or via connections with
Harvard. Educators and parent
organizations can begin using the
survey now without enlisting SurveyMonkey’s help.
Karen L. Mapp, a lecturer on
education at Harvard and the director of the education policy and
management master’s program
there, provided her expertise in
parent engagement to the survey’s development.
“Districts are really trying to
get parents more engaged in supporting their children’s learning;
there’s more of an academic focus
now on engagement efforts,” she
said. “Districts are saying, ‘We
want to change the paradigm on
parent engagement, but we just
don’t have the tools to measure
that.’ ”

Multiple Uses
At the same time, school districts that won Race to the Top
federal grants pledged to measure
school climate and collect data
that includes information about
how parents perceive school effectiveness.
Ms. Mapp, who was a familyand community-engagement official with the Boston district in
2003-04, said the questions in the
tool can be used with that goal in
mind as well.
“When I was deputy superintendent, we didn’t have anything
like this. I was turning to my
data colleagues saying, ‘Can you
develop a quick survey?’ ” recalled
Ms. Mapp.
Schools and parent-teacher organizations will be able to use
the results from the new parent
survey to direct their parent-engagement efforts more effectively,
according to Ms. Mapp. “It will
give parents and schools more
decisionmaking power about how
to more effectively help their kids
excel,” she said.
Tens of thousands of schools
have been using SurveyMonkey to

poll their parent communities for
more than a decade, according to
Bennett Porter, the vice president
of marketing communications for
the company.

Fine-Tuning
But not all questions are created equal. Many of the queries
crafted by school officials missed
aspects of family-school relationships that play key roles in students’ performance.
“Given the number of people
who are asking questions using
SurveyMonkey, we noticed that
there’s a big opportunity to help
people ask common questions in
ways that are methodologically
sound. … Let’s take these questions and write them in a way
that will minimize bias and the
risk of getting bad data, because
in the end, you’re using the answers/insights gleaned from a
survey to drive important decisions you’re making for your
school, so you want to be really
careful to have good data,” said
Will Aldrich, SurveyMonkey’s vice
president of product.
SurveyMonkey reached out to
Harvard to identify which questions would produce accurate information that districts could rely
on as meaningful for their assessment and decisionmaking about
parent involvement. The company
funded a research grant for the
Harvard Graduate School of Education to underwrite the research
and development of the questions.
Mr. Aldrich declined to disclose
the amount of the funding.
Hunter Gehlbach, an associate
professor in the school of education, led the team that developed
the survey between September
2011 and May 2012—a very aggressive turnaround for academic
survey designers, he said.
Arriving at the “right questions”
has been an arduous process, he
said. “Everyone’s taken surveys,
and they think it’s real simple,
but there’s a huge amount of science behind it,” said Mr. Gehlbach, who explained that four
doctoral students, Sofia Bahena,
Lauren Capotosto, James Noonan,
and Beth Schueler followed a rigorous six-step process under his
guidance.

Topic Areas
Starting with a review of the
academic literature, interviews,
and focus groups with parents,
the researchers developed a series of questions around seven
“constructs” or topic areas.
“Even with all the advance research, you don’t want to have
supreme confidence that you’ve
designed the right items,” Mr.
Gehlbach said. “So we went to the
experts, the academics and practitioners. We made some changes
based on their feedback, and took
the [questions] to parents, to
make sure they not only understood the wording of the items,

SEEKING FEEDBACK
The Harvard Graduate School of Education developed and field-tested a
71-question survey that schools can use via the SurveyMonkey website to solicit
parents’ feedback about their children’s educational experience. The survey,
divided into seven topical sections, can be offered in its entirety to a school
community, or schools can select questions from the most relevant categories
and add their own.
How often do you meet in person with teachers at your child’s school?
Almost
never

Once or twice
Every few
Monthly
Weekly
per year months or more

How often do you have conversations with your child about what his or her class
is learning at school?

iStock/jc_design

Harvard, SurveyMonkey serve up template

Almost
Once in
Sometimes
Frequently
Almost all
never a while the time


How involved have you been with a parent group(s) at your child’s school?
Not at
A little
Somewhat
Quite
Extremely
all involved involved involved involved involved

How confident are you in your ability to make choices about your child’s schooling?
Not confident
at all

Slightly
Somewhat
Quite
Extremely
confident confident confident confident

but that they resonated with the
language.”
That exercise proved to be eyeopening. “For example, in a topic
like ‘parental support,’ one thing
the literature picks up on is ‘parents helping with homework.’ ...
In focus groups, the parents actually tell us, ‘No, no, no, that’s
not so right. We don’t help our
children with specific homework
questions; we focus on getting our
children to understand the overall content they are learning in
class.’ ”
As a result, no questions using
the word “homework” appear in
the survey. Instead, questions
focus on helping a child understand the content he or she is
learning in school.
“The literature is incredibly
helpful, but you can’t just take
the academics’ word for it,” said
Mr. Gehlbach. “You have to check
in with the parents as well.”

‘Student Engagement’
Another area where parents diverged from academic language
was in the use of the term “student engagement.” Parents had
different interpretations of what
that means, so the survey designers chose “classes that motivate
children to learn,” rather than
mentioning “student engagement”
anywhere.
In defining the answers—which
academics call “response anchors”
like “very satisfied,” “somewhat
satisfied,” and “not at all satisfied”—Harvard researchers relied again on science and best
practices to ensure that parents’
answers would produce meaningful data.
Harvard’s goal was to group the
questions into discrete scales so
that the survey would offer flexibility to users interested in a
particular subject area. The seven
constructs measured by the scales
are:
• Parental support: How much

help are students getting at home?
• Child behaviors: What habits
have students developed that shape
their success?
• Parent engagement: How engaged are parents in their child’s
schooling, and what potential barriers exist?
• Parent self-efficacy: How confident are parents in supporting
their child’s schooling?
• School climate: How do parents
view their school regarding academic and social standards?
• School program fit: How well
do a school’s academic program,
social climate, and organizational
structure meet a student’s needs?
• Parent roles and responsibilities: How do parents view their
roles, as well as teachers’ roles, in
different aspects of their child’s
education?
The surveys will be useful in
many scenarios, such as helping
educators get a baseline measure
of how parents perceive the school
climate, determining what kind
of learning-related behaviors students are engaged in at home, and
identifying where the strengths
and weaknesses are in a school’s
relationship with parents, Mr.
Gehlbach said.

Broad Access
Schools and parent groups can
access the Question Bank, a repository of questions anyone can
use for free to ensure a survey
has well-written questions. To
ask more than 10 questions in
a survey via the SurveyMonkey
platform, organizations would be
charged according to one of three
plans, ranging in cost from $17
per month to $65 per month. The
top level offers the most analytical and support options.
Mr. Aldrich said that working
with the first cohort of earlyadopting districts will give his
company a good idea about what
tactics work best to maximize
response rates. In general, choos-

SOURCE: SurveyMonkey

ing the scales that are most relevant to a district will help, as
will keeping the surveys on the
shorter side. Parents can be invited to participate by email,
with reminder emails sent to
only those parents who did not
respond.
“Everything about SurveyMonkey is intended to be self-serve
and easy to get started,” said
Mr. Aldrich at SurveyMonkey,
explaining that schools and organizations are under no obligation
to talk to the company first. “The
template is available now, and
schools are using it now.”
Recognizing the digital divide
that exists for some respondents,
he said the surveys can be completed using the paper-and-pencil
method as well. The questions
have also been translated into
Spanish.

Offering a Resource
SurveyMonkey officials declined to name school districts
that are using the survey. But
Michael Sarbanes, the executive
director of the office of engagement for the Baltimore public
schools, said he is aware of it
through his participation in the
District Leaders Network on
Family and Community Engagement, held at the Institute for
Educational Leadership, a Washington-based nonprofit organization. He called the new survey a
good resource.
“We have our eye on it. One of
the critical pieces in [our] work
is getting actionable information
… that is real-time and practical
enough that you can adjust what
you’re doing based on the input
you’re getting. I think this will be
a helpful tool for that,” Mr. Sarbanes said.
Coverage of parent-empowerment
issues is supported by a grant from the
Walton Family Foundation, at www.
waltonfamilyfoundation.org.

http://www.edweek.org http://www.waltonfamilyfoundation.org http://www.waltonfamilyfoundation.org

Education Week - January 16, 2013

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