CIS Community Survey

A. SURVEY PURPOSE AND ADMINISTRATION

The APG School conducted the community survey in November to December 2019 by means of on-line questionnaires designed and set up by the CIS for each constituent group, the board, faculty, support staff, parents, students including the alumni. The purpose of the survey was to inform the school regarding areas of strength and improvement and what actions and priorities to be taken for school progress. As part of the Self-Study report to be developed for the CIS Team Evaluation, the community survey will inform and assist the school leaders to make significant decisions and future plans.

The questionnaires are composed of closed-ended questions relating to the CIS 8 domains: Domain A: Purpose and Direction ; Domain B: Governance, Leadership, and Ownership ; Domain C: The Curriculum ; Domain D: Teaching and Assessing for Learning ; Domain E: Students Learning and Well-Being ; Domain F: School Staffing ; Domain G: School Premises and Physical Accommodation ; Domain H: Community and Home Partnerships.

Though the school was permitted to include customised questions aligned to the school's strategic plan to the questionnaires, this step was not taken successfully due to lack of time and coordination. Thus, adjusting the survey instrument to include additional questions requested by the early childhood division was not carried out.

Conducting the survey as to when and how the links will be distributed was done according to a planned schedule prepared by the leadership team. While surveys to students were administered through their computer classes, the school's managebac was utilized to send the survey links to the alumni. The links to survey parents, faculty, staff, and the board were shared via the school e-mail and school WhatsApp.

Getting to the initial stage of conducting the survey was smoothly done in an organized manner. However, as the school is new to the community survey process, significant steps were overlooked such as: (1) establishing clear procedures to conduct the survey more effectively; (2) setting the target for appropriate sample size in surveying a large group; (3) formal follow up and orientation regarding the purpose of the survey promoting awareness and partnership with parents and to other stakeholders. In such cases, this resulted to poor engagement of parents in the community survey, as shown in Table 1.

The low response rate was thoroughly discussed, and since this is not ideal to further the analysis of the community survey, the school's CIS Steering Committee requested to re-open the survey to parents only, which was granted after several process of communication with the CIS. The result as shown in Table 2.

B. DATA ANALYSIS, FINDINGS AND ACTIONS

1. SURVEY RESPONSE RATES

Table 1 below displays the response rates and completion rates of all constituent groups, which are calculated according to the online survey definition or based on the following formula:

Completion Rate = No. of complete responses / Total No. of responses

Response Rate = Total No. of responses / Total No. of target respondents

Alumni completion rate 74.4% (response rate 33.4%)

Students completion rate 80.4% (response rate 79.7%)

Parents completion rate 46% (response rate 15.8%)

Faculty completion rate 62.8% (response rate 84.3%)

Support Staff completion rate 61.1% (response rate 60%)

Board completion rate 77.8% (response rate 100%)

Board has the highest percentage of response rate 100%, with 9 respondents

Faculty has active participation with 84% response rate (Out of 172 teachers, 145 joined the survey)

Student cohort has an active engagement with a response rate of 79.7% (643 responded out of 807 students)

Support Staff participation has 60% response rate ( out of 30 members 18 answered the survey)

Alumni has minimal participation of 33.4% response rate (out of 257 alumni, 87 joined the survey)

Parents response rate (15.8%) has the lowest percentage. Out of 1490 parents 235 responded, 127 partially answered while 108 answered the questionnaire completely. The data is over-represented by parents of KG 2, Grade 1 and Grade 4 compared to parents of those in other levels. This might provide a different meaning and affects statistical findings. Thus, the community survey committee felt the need to re-administer the survey hoping to obtain more accurate results. However, re-opening the survey was not possible due to short time-frame to complete all the requirements for the survey report. In Addition, CIS has other several reasons why this step is not permitted.

Parents respondents grouped per level