Last time, I looked at how parents, students and teachers answered the same question. Another interesting comparison is to look at how elementary schools, middle school and high school students answer the same question. There are only a few questions that are asked to all three groups.
I was really interested with the questions about feelings. Especially as a middle school teacher, I often watch student’s worlds change in ways they can’t quite explain. And their responses to the survey bears that out.
Students have trouble expressing their feelings at the get older. Not surprising – as students get older, they have more complex emotions and part of growing up is learning to express those emotions.
At the same time….
Students care less about other people’s feelings as they get older. 48% of elementary schools students care a tremendous amount (isn’t that adorable?) about other’s feelings, while only 20% of high schoolers feel the same way.
Interestingly, nowhere on the survey do they ask the most important question: Do adults on campus help you with your feelings? Does this school teach you how to manage your feelings? It is a school experience survey – but often, reading the questions, sometimes I wonder if it is just a youth-experience survey.
Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of questions on this survey that are great, and valuable, and measure student experience. But there are a lot of missed opportunities. I know – there are only so many questions that will fit. But there are also plenty of (in my opinion) useless questions on this survey. Do we really need to ask students “Do I feel safe in the neighborhood around my school?” when that is not really within the control of the school? And do we need to ask high schoolers if “In the past 30 days, I remembered or followed directions”?
I guess I might be old school here, but I want some of the old questions back. As recently as 2010, the school experience survey asked some basic, but important, questions about the school – whether the bathrooms are clean, whether students could go to an adult for help and whether adults at the school know the student’s name. Those are the kind of questions I want to see: ones that are deeply revealing and don’t dance around the issues.