School-Family-Community
Partnership Survey
This
survey is designed to help schools determine parent
and staff perceptions regarding the use of technology
to support school-family-community partnerships. It
is specifically intended to provide information to help
school-level planners - administrators, technology and
media specialists, and school or technology planning
team members - make decisions about the use of technology
to support the school's family and community involvement
efforts.
Background
This
survey was developed to help school and district teams
gather data from parents and school staff regarding
the effects of technology initiatives on family and
community partnerships with schools.
Using
a well-established family involvement model, the Six
Types of Involvement framework (Epstein, 2001), this
survey specifically addresses how schools can plan and
implement technology projects that support school-family-community
partnerships.
The
six types of involvement in schools make up the following
six facets of the survey:
-
Parenting – helping all families establish a
home environment to support their children as students
- Communicating
– designing effective forms of school-to-home
and home-to-school communications about school programs
and student progress
-
Volunteering – recruiting and organizing parent
help and support
- Learning
at Home – providing information and ideas to
families about how to help students at home with homework
and other curriculum-related activities, decisions,
and planning
- Decision
Making – including parents in school decisions,
developing parent leaders and representatives
- Collaborating
with the Community – identifying and integrating
resources and services from the community to strengthen
school programs, family practices, and student learning
and development
For additional information on Epstein’s work with
the National Network of Partnership Schools, please
visit the National
Network of Partnership Schools.
Data
and Reporting
The
technology-partnership survey collects perceptive data
- what respondents think - about how technology is used
at your school to support school-family-community partnerships.
Analysis of data provides a picture of the school as
a whole - not of individual staff members - presented
as frequencies and percentages of responses to all items,
and bar graph representations of those values.
Technology-partnership
survey data should not be analyzed quantitatively, even
where the paper-and-pencil instrument is coded numerically
to facilitate data entry. A mean score of a single item,
for example, is completely meaningless since a mean
of 3 could be achieved by any number of frequency distributions.
Using
the Technology-Partnership Survey in Your School
The
instrument is available either online or as a PDF document,
ready for duplication and distribution to respondents.
To
use the online version, contact
Jeni Corn by email to arrange for initialization
of your school's individual technology-partnership survey.
Be prepared to provide some specific information:
-
The name of your school
- The
number of respondents expected to complete the survey
- The
date on which parents or staff members may start responding
- The
date on which responses should end
Once
the response period has ended, a report url is provided
only to the original school contact. Data is not used
for any other purpose without express consent of school
administrators.
A
sample
of the online technology-partnership survey is available
for review. Note that, while it is completely functional
and may be completed and submitted, no data will be
reported to the Technology in Learning Program staff
or to the visitor reviewing the instrument.
To
use the paper-and-pencil version, download
and freely distribute the PDF
version of the document. This is a stop-gap version
of the instrument, for which frequencies and percentages
must be calculated manually at this time.
Reference
Epstein,
J. (2001). School, family, and community partnerships:
Preparing educators and improving schools. Westview
Press: Boulder, CO.
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