Surveying students wellbeing: An overview of questions, frequency & insights
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Surveying students wellbeing: An overview of questions, frequency & insights
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This article was originally published in September 2021 and was last reviewed and updated by the Komodo Psychology Team in October, 2024.
How do we capture student wellbeing?
Mental health and wellbeing can be a challenging topic for anybody to open up and speak freely about, especially for students undergoing a myriad of ever changing challenges. From coping with academic expectations and social media pressures to maintaining meaningful relationships with their peers and conducting a healthy lifestyle, students today are facing a completely new set of pressures and stressors compared to previous generations.
Due to its subjective nature, along with the numerous factors that can trigger change throughout the year, understanding students wellbeing at a school-wide level is no easy task even for the most experienced educators. School staff members who play a key role in overlooking students' well-being need effective systems and tools in place in order to gain visibility over how every single student is doing across all assigned houses/classrooms, on a regular basis and in a timely manner.
Surveying students is key to finding out if anything is troubling them - from academic pressure to sleep issues, bullying, social relationships, connectedness to the community and other factors.
Research shows that for adolescents, data collected via self-reports is the most accurate and representative of their internal world and lived experience, compared to other methodologies such as observation.
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Generally, by this age, adolescents have a pretty good gauge on what is going on for them, and self report is a less confrontational way to gather honest responses. This powerful information gives staff an accurate insight into wellbeing and difficulties students face, which provides opportunity for prevention and early intervention. Gathering self-report data can be done through the use of surveys - an easy, adaptable and non-confrontational way to collect rich quantitative data. The results of the surveys may lead to a check in, which provides staff an opportunity to check in with students who have either requested it, or whose wellbeing data is tracking low. Research shows that regular check-ins provide a comfortable environment for students to voice their needs and concerns. This safe, non judgemental approach plays a key role in ensuring wellness, such as highlighting concerns and providing the required support before they escalate into bigger issues.
So, whats next?
When it comes to the creation of a survey, selecting reliable and valid questions to address potential issues is the first step towards gathering crucial information. The questions within the Komodo library go through a careful creation process and represent a collection of evidence-based psychometric questions and surveys. This includes but is not limited to the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ), Difficulties with Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS) and Student Resilience Survey. A key element of the question library is ensuring they fit within our wellbeing themes, which also serve to reflect the potential wellbeing issues faced by schools. Library questions cover a wide range of topics such as: how students feel about attending school, socialising with their peers or major transitions like starting high school or getting ready for university. Questions can also be selected to be more targeted to meet the needs of the individual school or cohort such as: direct screening of mental health difficulties, home sickness, sleep and eating patterns. The team at Komodo work alongside each school to create questionnaires that meet the needs of their wellbeing strategies, frameworks and guiding values.
How are the questions measured?
The answering of the questions is done in 2 forms: emojis, and a sliding scale.
Emojis offers a visual answer to the questions, which may be more age appropriate for younger students, and may also be a bit of fun for older students. A visual guide can help students make more sense of their feelings, as sometimes these things can be difficult to put into words, regardless of our vocabulary! Additionally, there is also the option of the sliding scale for students with a more advanced vocabulary. Our recommendation, and what appears to work generally for our schools, is to use predominantly emojis for younger students, and predominantly sliding scale for older students. Using a mix may help to boost survey engagement, as it allows the student to stop and consider their answer, not just going through the survey on auto pilot.
Both the emojis and the sliding scale offer 5 answers. Generally, 5 points gives enough range for accuracy within the data. The data may be negatively skewed by having too many points, which may cause people to over-thinking their answers, or by having too few, which may lead to the student not having a point that reflects their true response.
How often should you survey?
The reality is, there is no right answer. How frequently surveys ought to be sent out really depends on your school. However, there is a spectrum to explore and different frequencies bring both positives and potential downsides. To survey more frequently brings, in theory, more data and insight, which strives to capture more acute changes in student wellbeing. The thinking is the more you survey, the more opportunities you’re providing to students to give feedback. However, the reality of something like a daily survey is students will get survey fatigue. What was once a great way for them to provide feedback and reflect on their wellbeing becomes another chore, resulting in under completion of surveys and inaccurate data due to survey fatigue.
On the other hand, sending surveys out too seldom, such as twice a year, isn’t enough to enable regular, accurate visibility of students’ wellbeing. Staff won’t be able to detect and provide support for potential issues before they turn into actual problems, and students won’t have a regular opportunity to express their concerns or reflect on their wellbeing. Also, under surveying will be less likely to accurately capture the wellbeing trends within the school, as they will only capture what was going on at the time the surveys were completed.
So - what's the recommendation?
At Komodo, our schools use our wellbeing surveys tool differently, depending on what is realistic for their school. We typically see, and our recommendation, is that schools survey between weekly and fortnightly on a set schedule to optimize engagement. Schools may engage in trial-and-error, seeing what frequency acquires best engagement from the students. It may be that schools begin the year at weekly, then drop to fortnightly once a baseline is established, and students and teachers are familiar with the platform. Fortnightly data is frequent enough that the data is rich, detailed, and representative of the wellbeing themes, but not so frequent as to cause survey fatigue, or to overwhelm staff and students with another task on their already busy schedules. Additionally, fortnightly is regular enough that one missed survey won't have a majorly negative impact on the data. The most accurate data comes from engagement in the surveys, rather than frequency, therefore it is a case by case based decision as to how often surveys should be scheduled, in order to optimize engagement and obtain the most accurate data.
From quantitative to qualitative
The Komodo platform also has the option to include open comments at the end of each survey. This provides the opportunity for students to open up about a matter that may not be directly surveyed but is personally troubling them. This communication is able to occur in a medium that is familiar to students and removes the barriers that can come with having to directly approach staff members. It is a simple yet powerful tool to voice any concerns in an environment that feels safe and free from judgment. In a similar way, but outside of the timely boundary of surveys, the urgent check-in feature allows students to immediately request interactions with staff so that they may voice their difficulties in a timely manner. All it takes is accessing the dedicated feature in the profile saved on their device and fire through a request to the staff member of choice. The staff member is then notified in real-time and can take action right away. With the combination of open comments and urgent check-ins, staff can keep on top of what their students are going through and intervene when required with a proactive approach.
To read more about the value of student self-reports in wellbeing data, and how to monitor, measure & manage student wellbeing check out the following blogs.
Would you like to learn more about wellbeing surveying? Get in touch today, we’ll help you plan out the best approach for your school needs.
