Category: School Climate Assessment

Students Can Learn From Adaptive Surveys

New technological advances have made it possible to develop an adaptive, responsive, and flexible survey tool that can deliver to educators more reliable and valuable data than traditional surveys. Moreover, the assessment process itself is a learning experience. By answering research-based questions that encourage reflection over the school year, students have an opportunity to build their emotional skills, process emotions, and improve their social and emotional vocabulary to help them interact more effectively with others and better express how they are feeling.

Building Emotional Skills

Adaptive surveys create the opportunity to include student voice in a community approach to well-being and mental health. For example, using monthly check-ins, students can reflect on their feelings and experiences of school life and share their opinions with their teachers and school counselors. Throughout the school year, adaptive surveys help students develop their emotional skills to better monitor and regulate their behaviors, attitudes, and actions towards their peers and teachers. The results are two-tiered: students are empowered when they see that their voices matter and become more connected to their school community.

Processing Emotions

Emotional regulation is necessary to remember, retrieve, transfer, and connect all new information to what we already know. Unfortunately, children and adolescents who are only beginning to understand what emotions are and how they impact behavior lack the coping skills to properly regulate their feelings.

An adaptive survey that consistently asks students questions about how safe, supported, included, and engaged they feel at school helps them learn about their emotions. By communicating how they feel at school, teachers and school health professionals can use these insights to help their students connect emotions and behaviors, which is essential to assist them in finding the control they need to manage their behavior.

Articulating Views and Feelings

As adults, we sometimes have difficulty articulating our views and feelings in a way that does not invite disconnect in our relationships with others. So how can we help children and adolescents learn how to express what they feel tactfully and meaningfully? We can start by giving them the right words to say.

Routinely answering evidence-based questions that encourage reflection, students learn social and emotional vocabulary that could help them interact more effectively with others and express their feelings. You may think that is what a traditional survey does, but there are advantages to using an adaptive survey when building student vocabulary. Frequently offering a fixed survey where students see the same questions in the same order can lead to assessment fatigue. Questions are answered mindlessly, and vocabulary retention is replaced by just filling in responses. An adaptive survey that uses the same fixed questions but in a different order, at different times, and in smaller batches throughout the school year keeps students engaged and more reflective. It is more important to understand what the question is asking to provide a response. As a result, students learn how to articulate their emotions.

Insights with Bloomsights

Bloomsights is an assessment tool aimed at gauging student well-being and improving school climate to comprehensively encourage student social emotional development. First, simplify your SEL data to clarify your students’ needs and determine necessary interventions. Then, get meaningful and ongoing insights to plan and implement strategies that support improved student and school outcomes.

Reach out to Bloomsights for an in-depth discussion on how to implement a quality social and emotional assessment plan. Visit https://bloomsights.com/ to start your trial of Bloomsights today!

Social Emotional Solutions: Evaluating Student Needs Using Adaptive and Innovative Technology

Surveys are a critical part of early intervention and school improvement strategies. But the survey tool that you implement must enable you to use best practices while embracing new strategies and technologies.

An adaptive, responsive, and flexible school climate survey tool can deliver best practices with significant improvements over traditional methods.

Once a year vs. continuous assessment

Online surveys have made it more efficient to assess how students, staff, and parents feel about different aspects of school climate such as school safety, learning and teaching, school environment, and social relationships.

However, a survey that is only administered annually provides school faculty with a mere “snapshot” of a school’s climate. Additionally, the large amount of time that it takes for schools to receive survey results runs counter to the point of early intervention.

An adaptive school climate tool is built upon the idea that data is reliable and useful only if it is collected routinely over the course of the school year.

Fixed vs. adaptive

Traditionally, surveys ask the exact same questions once a year. Simply offering the same fixed survey more frequently isn’t reliable nor useful especially because such practice can lead to assessment fatigue, where questions are answered mindlessly and without reflection.

An adaptive school climate tool pairs a large bank of questions with adaptive technology that identifies and strategically delivers the most relevant questions to each student over the full course of the school year.

Data paralysis vs. data analysis

Teachers today are swimming in data, and it is not enough to show them student responses to questions. We need to provide teachers with data in a way that answers the questions “So what?” and “Now what?”

A digital school climate tool frames data use in new ways so that insights gleaned are seen as augmenting, instead of replacing, teachers’ valuable and intuitive observations in the classroom.

The assessment process itself is a learning experience for both students and teachers. Through the process of answering carefully designed questions that encourages reflection, students learn social and emotional vocabulary that could help them to interact more effectively with others and to express how they are feeling.

Digital school climate tools will help teachers to recognize even the subtlest of indicators of school climate that may normally go unnoticed, but that could serve as a stimulus for early intervention—critical for issues related to feelings of isolation, loneliness, and student well-being as well as bullying. Moreover, they give teachers a way to think about and to clearly communicate survey results to students, school staff, and parents.

Insights with Bloomsights

At Bloomsights, we are experts at creating adaptive, responsive, and flexible school climate surveys. Reach out to Bloomsights for an in-depth discussion on how to implement a quality social and emotional assessment plan. Visit https://bloomsights.com/ or call 970.568.8981.