The CIS community survey that forms part of the accreditation process is a comprehensive tool for gathering feedback on all aspects of the school's operations, reaching out to all constituencies and covering all domain areas.
The survey generates a huge amount of data (no less than 50,000 data points in our case) and this is typically distilled into dozens of pages of information. From this information we hope to gain insights into our strengths and areas for improvement and possibly even discover some new knowledge about how we are perceived by our community.
The majority of the survey questions are in closed form consisting of statements to which responders are asked to indicate whether they Strongly Agree, Agree, Disagree or Strongly Disagree. There is no option to record a neutral response but it is possible to indicate that the question is not applicable. All the statements are framed from a positive aspect so agreements are regarded as good results and and disagreement as areas for improvement.
To simplify the interpretation of results we use a color coding scheme from Green (agreement) to Red (Disagreement). As an internal benchmark we hope to maintain an average around 1.00 over all questions.
Here is an example calculation of an average score and associated colour-coding
Line 25 – Alumni – there are opportunities to improve how we engage alumni to support current members of the school.
Line 127 – Faculty – there is a suggestion that professional training and support to help staff identify students with special learning needs, gifts and talents would be welcome.
Line 136 – Faculty – there is an opportunity to develop how standardized test results might be used to measure and improve student learning.
Line 220 – Parents – there is an opportunity to improve communications of our acceptable use policies for technology.
We are also able to compare our results with those of all other schools participating in the same survey. This analysis revealed some interesting outcomes that augment our individual results. Follow ths link for more details.