Why School Perceptions is better.

School Perceptions is the nation's most trusted, objective and independent education survey research and consulting firm.

Whether your project is large (state-level) or small (school or grade specific), there are three reasons why using School Perceptions is your ideal survey research partner.

• Content: School Perceptions has a database with over 9 million responses to survey questions. Our research-based survey items are already proven to be reliable and valid. Our experience working with hundreds of school districts around the country allows us to ask the right question to the right groups. If you use a self-serve tool, you will need to spend a great deal of time writing your own survey (usually 5-7 people working for 4-6 hours for a total of 30 hours) and even then the questions may not be reliable.
  
  
• Perspective: Let's say you ask a question like "Do you feel safe at school?" and you find out that 87% of your students answer yes. Is that good or bad? If you found out that of the last 30 schools that used that question, your school scored the highest you would feel great. If you found out that in the past year no other school had scored that low - you would know you have a big problem. With School Perceptions you are given the perspective you need to understand your data.
  
  
• A Valid Set of Data: When you ask parents and students about issues such as schools and programs you will often trigger strong emotions. This sometimes causes people to want to give you their opinion more than once. With generic survey tools like Survey Monkey there is no workable solution to this problem. Some survey tools try to stop people from taking the survey multiple times by placing a cookie on your computer. This does not work for two reasons. The first is that tech-savvy users will quickly remove the cookie and take the survey again and again. The second reason is that in a school setting, multiple teachers or students often share a computer - and thus are not able to take the survey because someone else has previously taken it on that machine. The end result is this: Using School Perceptions you can be assured that everyone has had the opportunity to take the survey once, but no one has taken the survey more than once. Using other tools such as Survey Monkey, you will never be sure if someone skewed your entire data set by taking the survey 10 or even 100 times.

Once you take into account the time writing the survey (School Perceptions does this for you), the time spent programming a do-it-yourself tool (School Perceptions programs your survey for you) and the time spent analyzing your results (School Perceptions has analysis tools that do this for you) it is usually less expensive to use School Perceptions. In addition to this you get proven survey content, perspective with your results, and a data set that is valid because no one could take the survey more than once.

Comparison Chart

	Paper & Pencil Surveys	Telephone Surveys	Self-Serve Online Surveys	School Perceptions
Data can be collected and correlated between Staff, Parents, Students, and Community members using different questions but within the same categories revealing critical "perception gaps".	No	No	No	Yes
Results are instantly available at any time during and after the survey is taken. No more waiting three months for an inadequate three ring binder to begin the improvement process.	No	No	Yes	Yes
Survey questions and demographics can be easily customized for your school / district but questions are based on best practice questions from past experience. This also allows for district to district comparisons if desired.	No	No	No	Yes
Respondent comment data is easily gathered for each specific area of the survey. Access to comment data can be limited by passwords at a school or district level.	No	No	No	Yes
Results can be easily reverse segmented by multiple different demographics or questions. It is one thing to know that 20% of your students don't feel safe at school, however, it is much more valuable to know "who said it" in terms of their demographic profile (gender, grade level, etc.)	No	No	No	Yes
At School Perceptions we realize that many educators are not statisticians - and have no desire to be. For this group, we provide analysis tools to tabulate and mine the data for you. Critical results are displayed graphically to quickly and easily build consensus.	No	No	No	Yes
Individual survey access I.D. Numbers guarantee access security: No one can take the survey more than once.	No	No	No	Yes
For people who do not have access to a computer, paper versions of the survey are available.	Yes	No	No	Yes
Educate your entire community - cost effectively -on critical issues and build ownership in the solution during the survey process.	No	No	No	Yes