System-Wide Improvement, Monitoring and Evaluation

OUR SERVICES

System-Wide Improvement, Monitoring and Evaluation

Building Strong Foundations to Support Educational Change

NSI’s School Climate Suite® for System-Wide Improvement and Evaluation: Features and Benefits

Comprehensive Coverage

Available for Staff, Students, and Parents/Caregivers

Sound Psychometric Properties

Comprehensive School-Level and System-Level Reports

Flexible Administration

Alignment with the System's Educational Framework

Monitors Improvement Efforts

Evaluating the Efficacy of Programs

Using school climate as a process criterion to evaluate programs

NSI's System-Wide Foundation for Improvement

Although it appears logical to improve student outcomes through direct measures, growing evidence suggests that the success of such efforts is unlikely in schools with cultural dysfunction. To further aggravate the problem, dysfunctional school climates (e.g., those with low levels of trust/safety) promote inequities and opportunity gaps.

NSI’s tools and processes help develop positive school climates that support educational change efforts. The characteristics of positive school climates, such as a sense of community and high levels of relational trust, are critical in reducing resistance to change and help build psychological safety, allowing school members to speak out, share ideas and experiment with innovations.

Our instruments and services inform the development of school improvement plans, provide professional development and resources that develop skills related to collaborative inquiry, and provide data to inform evidence-based decision-making about organisational change.

NSI’s School Climate Suite: Comprehensive, Reliable Measures

Instruments in our School Climate Suite® assess the perceptions of:

Parents/caregivers.
Students (primary and secondary school level).
Staff (teachers and support staff).

The instruments that make up NSI’s School Climate Suite^®:

Have evidence of strong psychometric properties (supporting validity and reliability).
Provide a measure of fit (or misfit) (between actual and preferred perceptions).
Provide a process-oriented approach to attaining goals through gradual and continual growth and improvement.

The instruments in NSI’s School Climate Suite^® provide comprehensive coverage across four broad categories:

Community (quality of interpersonal relationships within the school).
Safety (quality of the physical and emotional security provided by the school).
Academic atmosphere (quality of the academic support including instruction, teacher training, and professional development).
Institutional environment (organisational features of the school environment, including school connectedness and affirming cultural diversity).

A summary of the features and benefits NSI’s School Climate Suite^® for system-wide improvement, monitoring, and evaluation can be downloaded here.

Aligning to the System's Educational Framework

Tailoring instruments ensures that they assess important system-wide goals and align with features of the system’s educational framework. Following a gap analysis, modifications made in collaboration with nominated system personnel may include:

Restructuring the School Climate Suite® to align with the educational framework.
Developing contextually responsive constructs.
Adding questions/statements.
Adding background variables.
Making changes to language to ensure suitability.

Contextual Appreciation – School-level

NSI acknowledges and appreciates the unique context of schools. As such, schools are invited, under the guidance of our expert research team and advisement from the system, to contextualise the School Climate Suite^®. This may include:

Comprehensive Reports to Schools and the System

School-Level Reports

Individual schools within the system are provided with comprehensive feedback reports based on participants’ responses, using fit-for-purpose, user-friendly charts.

System-level Reports

Aggregated system-level reports are generated using the data from all schools that administered instruments in the School Climate Suite^® in the same academic year. For systems that engage with the School Climate Suite^® over time, longitudinal data is provided to examine trends. In addition to a snapshot of school members’ views across the system, the data is aggregated based on groups (identified by the system) to allow comparisons, such as:

Effective Means of Monitoring and Evaluation

A healthy, positive school climate is the foundation of improvement efforts and a key to improving student outcomes. NSI’s School Climate Suite offers systems a means of helping schools develop positive school climates by providing the following:

Baseline data to inform strategic decisions about the needs of schools.
Longitudinal data to help monitor improvement efforts within and across schools.
A means to evaluate the impact of programs or interventions.

NSI’s School Climate Suite^® provides a means of evaluating the effectiveness of the processes used in programs and interventions introduced across schools. Given that at the heart of programs designed to address problems such as student behaviour or bullying (e.g., restorative practices) is the development of a positive school climate, measures in our School Climate Suite provide a process criterion.