Research has begun to show that certain schoolwide characteristics--such as student-centered learning environments, leadership, and safety--can be important for improving student outcomes. In keeping with these insights, school improvement efforts around the country are becoming less narrowly focused on the performance of individual students and…

Teacher and principal surveys are among the most common data collection techniques employed in education research. Yet there is remarkably little research on survey methods in education, or about the most cost-effective way to raise response rates among teachers and principals. In an effort to explore various methods for increasing survey response…

The Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) will establish technical standards and guidelines to ensure that the survey design and implementation processes of PIAAC yield high-quality and internationally comparable data. This document provides a revised version of the technical standards and guidelines originally…

The popularity of the sample survey in educational research makes it necessary for consumers to tell a good study from a poor one. Several sources were identified that gave advice on how to evaluate a sample design. The sources are either limited or too extensive to use in a practical sense. The purpose of this paper is to recommend six important…

Online data collection in academic research might be replacing paper-and-pencil surveys or questionnaires in the near future. This paper discusses the advantages and limitations of online data collection, with particular reference to the conduct of two qualitative studies involving upper secondary school teachers and students in Iceland in 2002.…

This chapter discusses the theoretical literature on why people choose to respond to a survey and reviews the latest empirical research on how survey administration and the characteristics of a survey affect response rates. (Contains 1 figure.)

The nine-volume Survey Kit is designed to help readers prepare and conduct surveys and become better users of survey results. All the books in the series contain instructional objectives, exercises and answers, examples of surveys in use, illustrations of survey questions, guidelines for action, checklists of "dos and don'ts," and…

This brief report summarizes the results of a survey of professors of educational administration in the southern region of the United States, which sought to determine whether preparation programs were democratically administered. The survey included some demographic questions, 12 questions that asked respondents to rank preparation programs…