The Client
Richfield Middle School is a 6th, 7th, and 8th grade school organized into blocks and teams of students and teachers. Teachers extend their classroom teaching with special topics or projects during that time to help students become more successful.
As the students move to eighth grade, so do their teachers. This allows for a more personal approach as they explore knowledge and learning together. When students move on to high school, the teachers loop back to 7th grade to pick up a new team of students.
Allied Arts, or Exploratory, classes are offered to each student at every grade. Classes such as family and consumer science, art, tech, and computers broaden the student’s perspective on the world of learning and exposes them to new ideas and skills. These “exploratory” classes also serve to spark student interest in topics that they may take as electives once they enter high school. Many of our students are also enrolled in special education, ESL and gifted/talented programs.
The Solution
Wonderlic Opinion Survey (WOS): The Wonderlic Opinion Survey is designed to help schools gather student, faculty, parent and/or community attitudes and information on issues that impact the entire educational process. These third-party surveys provide a neutral channel for communication that will provide the vital feedback needed for school improvement planning.
A Wonderlic consultant works with school representative to customize subject matter to meet specific needs, implement and manage the survey process and produce reports that are easy to understand and interpret. Wonderlic surveys are much more cost-effective than in-house solutions and can be administered by paper and pencil, the Internet or the telephone.
Wonderlic Survey Uncovers Surprising Facts About Middle School’s Culture
In 2004, Susan Sommerfeld, principal of Richfield Middle School in Richfield, MN knew she needed to do a satisfaction survey of students, teachers and parents. The No Child Left Behind Act had language insinuating that survey data would be a required part of accreditation. A validation team had been brought in to assess the state of the institution, and a school improvement plan was in the works. “It was a pivotal year for the school,” she says.
Sommerfeld needed data to analyze the school’s assumptions about what was working and what needed improvement, and she also wanted feedback from the community. “Surveying was an integral part of that process,” she says.Instead of trying to do it in-house, Sommerfeld sought outside expertise to help her craft and deliver the surveys. She researched several companies and chose Wonderlic because of its easy-to-use tools and the great customer service she received from Greg Olsen, her Wonderlic consultant. “I liked all of his personal touches,” she says. “He answered all of my questions and spent lots of time with me, putting the survey together and helping me present the data later on.”
Olsen worked directly with Sommerfeld and her survey team, to identify the kinds of questions to ask and how to present them. They selected and tweaked roughly 50 questions in three formats for parents, faculty, and students. The surveys were made available on paper, on the Web and by phone.
Because it was the first survey done under her tenure, Sommerfield wanted questions that covered a broad spectrum of topics, with a focus on the climate of the school. She was especially interested in whether students felt happy and well-respected by their peers and teachers.
The response rate was high with more than 80 percent of students responding and only a bit less than that from parents and staff. Wonderlic helped the school tabulate and thoroughly analyze the results which were delivered back to Sommerfeld in an easy-to-interpret report. “Survey data is usually so cumbersome and dense,” Sommerfeld says. “But with Wonderlic it wasn’t like that. It was light and easy to read, but it had lots of information.”
One of the most surprising pieces of information garnered from the survey was from the section on school climate. Students gave the highest marks when asked whether they felt adults in the school respected them, and the lowest marks for whether they felt respected by their peers. “If we hadn’t known this we might have spent a lot more effort working with teachers,” Sommerfeld says. “We customized our program based on this information.”
Sommerfeld’s team created a specific action plan that included support for an anti-bullying program and a program called Essential 55, based on the book by Ron Clark on the 55 rules for teaching children. Both programs had been under consideration before the survey, but the survey data validated the need for the programs and justified the investment. “We were able to use the data from all three Wonderlic surveys to create our school improvement plans for 2004-2005,” she says. “It was a complete affirmation of what we were doing.”
However, creating an improvement plan was only half the battle for Richfield. To make the most of the survey data, the people who completed the survey needed to know the overall results and what the school planned to do with the information. Sommerfeld knew that delivering survey results to the community is a critical part of getting buy-in for projects and for future surveys, but she wasn’t sure how to go about it.
Again, Olsen supported her. Along with posting results at the website, he helped Sommerfeld create a custom presentation to deliver those results to administrators, teachers and parent groups, giving her tips on how to deliver the information to get the most impact and buy-in. “I never forgot that,” she says. “His advice was right on and the presentations were a huge success.”
