Parent Involvement Surveys

Family involvement in the educational process is a crucial part of ensuring the long term success of students. Not all learning takes place inside of the classroom – especially when the child is at a young age – and so making sure that parents are involved and supported in their child's life becomes a crucial component of ensuring that they're getting the education they need and deserve. That's why you may want to develop a parent and family involvement in education survey, much like the surveys that have been compiled and completed by the Ohio Department of Education.

These surveys are an important tool for understanding how parents view important issues that relate to being an engaged parent. Some examples of what schools need to do to get engaged parents include: Empowering parents and families to be more supportive of their child's learning within the home. Communicating often with families about the child and the school itself.

Allowing parents the opportunity to be more actively engaged in the planning, decision making, and volunteering process. Ensuring families are connected to support that they can utilize when they need it. Making sure parents and families also have high expectations for the students, and that the school supports these expectations through their own high quality instruction.

Developing a culture that is welcoming and inclusive to parents and their input. These are the types of factors that play a critical role in attracting more parental support, and developing relationships with parents that also improves student outcomes. By running this survey, schools can get an idea of how well they've met the above goals.

If parents and families don't feel that these goals have been met correctly, then programs can be put in place to improve in each of these areas, and the surveys can be run again in future years to see if these outcomes have been reached. The survey is available for free download. This helpful website gives schools an idea of how to conduct this research effectively.

Some of the statements in the survey (such as the free data from the Ohio Department of Education) appear to no longer be applicable, but on page 5 you can see the entirety of the parent and family involvement survey. Simply cut and paste each question into the SurveyMethods platform and program the answers. Once completed, you can send the survey out to your email list or have parents fill out the survey at a school event.

Your first survey can provide you with a baseline from which to assess your school overall. Eventually, that data can be used to track changes in parent and family involvement yearly, in order to see if the programs you've put in place have provided any sort of long term changes.

It does not appear that the Ohio Department of Education still releases data for comparison schools. But there are still several things you can do. First, comparison schools may not be necessary.

Your goal is to turn your good school into a great school, so developing strategies for improving parental involvement (and ultimately the response to this survey) is incredibly valuable. Second, you can also use the online publishing feature to share your data with other schools in your area. You can contact other principles to partner with you, under the assumption that you'll share data via the online publishing tool.

Doing so will allow you to track where these schools seem to rate and whether or not they've improved, so that you can easily compare your school to theirs. You may need to rally other principles together to get them to engage in this type of survey research, but you should find that many of these institutions recognize the value of parental involvement.

Those that find that their school is in need of additional parental involvement can either brainstorm changes themselves, or use available information to see if any ideas look like they'll help your institution. The North Carolina Public School system has a useful toolkit available for free on its website, and several other states have developed their own family involvement recommendations that you can attempt to implement. The parental involvement survey is only one step for improving the long term outcomes of the children enrolled at your school, but it's an important one. The more you measure and address issues that relate to childhood learning outside the school, the more the students are going to be prepared for their classes and prepared for moving forward in their academic life.