Opportunity
Like many educational institutions, the Hawaii Department of Education was challenged to find better data on teacher effectiveness and student outcomes.
The Department decided to piloted student perception surveys in a handful of schools to get a feel for how valuable the data would be.
Solution
Over a five-year period beginning in 2011, Cambridge Education worked with the Department to administer student perception surveys to every teacher throughout the state, as an element of the Department’s Educator Effectiveness System. Cambridge Education understood the importance of piloting the surveys, vetting the survey process, and gathering feedback to ensure the survey administration process could be easily rolled out statewide.
In each pilot study, the student perception surveys were administered twice a year to participating teachers. With each consecutive pilot, the Department relied on Cambridge Education to scale up the size of the administration.
In the 2013-2014 school year, the Educator Effectiveness System was fully implemented. Cambridge Education successfully administered student perception surveys for every teacher in every school in the state: 256 schools and over 13,000 teachers in all. Reports were incorporated into teacher’s evaluation scores and provided to teachers to provide student feedback.
Cambridge Education and the Department also administered surveys statewide in the following two school years. Given the diverse student population in the state of Hawaii, we initiated a campaign to translate the student survey into 13 languages.
Outcome
The Hawaii Department of Education and Cambridge Education partnership made educational history as one of the first states to provide all teachers an opportunity to review student perceptions data, reflect, and select actions for improvement based on these results.
Through the five years of partnership, Cambridge Education helped Hawaii to build capacity, administer over 250,000 online and paper surveys, and provide reports to over 13,000 educators each year.
Each year, Cambridge Education and the Department have drawn on our strong partnership to continually improve. Actions arising from these surveys have enabled Cambridge Education to support the state to effectively redesign its evaluation system to meet the needs of students and teachers.