Student Voice to Student Outcomes Survey
The Student Voice Survey Guide provides your school or district with actionable insights on student voice practices.
Why Measure Student Voice Practices?
Student Voice Practices (SVPs) can be defined as the opportunities students have to participate in and influence the educational decisions that shape their lives and the lives of their peers.
Extensive research shows that students who engage in SVPs experience greater academic gains and positive social-emotional outcomes. One mechanism for centering student voice in a school’s improvement efforts is to measure how students experience SVPs in their classrooms and schools.
However, figuring out how best to measure student voice remains a challenge. We are here to help. Our Student Voice Survey Guide can help you collect valid and reliable data on how your school supports students in shaping and influencing educational decisions so that all students can thrive.
Resources
Student Voice to Student Outcomes Survey
Resource Audience
How Did We Develop the Survey?
The Student Voice to Student Outcomes Survey was developed in collaboration with the following Search Institute partners: Dr. Dana Mitra of Pennsylvania State University, Dr. Jerusha Conner of Villanova University, and Dr. Samantha Holquist of Child Trends.
This team of researchers followed a rigorous measurement development process to ensure measures are valid and reliable, which included a large pilot effort of the survey with five school partners across two different school districts. For more information about the validity and reliability of these measures, please reach out to research@search-institute.org.
What Does the Survey Measure?
The survey includes a suite of measures or sets of questions that assess different components of student voice practices and related topics. These measures are organized into four sections:
- School-level student voice practices. Includes measures that assess both educator and student perspectives on students’ access and participation in opportunities to influence educational decisions, student leadership, and school leaders responsiveness to students' improvement ideas.
- Classroom-level student voice practices. Includes measures that assess both educator and student perspectives on whether teachers collaborate with students in decision making, and ask for student input and are responsive to students’ feedback.
- Enabling classroom factors. Includes measures that may influence school-level and classroom-level student voice practices, such as the strength of student-teacher relationships or creating an interactive learning environment.
- Enabling student factors. Includes measures that may influence students’ decisions to engage in student voice practices, such as students’ agency to share ideas or teachers' receptiveness to students’ feedback.
Want Support in Implementing the Survey?
The Student Voice Survey Guide provides the full suite of student voice measures available. These measures are designed to be self-explanatory for educators and students. As such, these measures can be integrated into your data collection tools, and administered individually like any other self-report questionnaire or rating scale.
We also offer a Student Voice Survey Module as a part of our Developmental Relationships Survey offerings. Through this customizable survey, you’ll receive survey administration support, online access to the survey, and an interactive data dashboard featuring real-time results.
Learn More About Our Survey Services.
The content on this page and all resources associated with The Student Voice Survey Guide were created by Samantha Holquist and Dana Mitra, with technical and editorial assistance from Search Institute Staff. Suggested Citation: Conner, J., Holquist, S., Mitra, D., & Search Institute. (2023). State of Student Voices in Schools Survey. Minneapolis, MN: Search Institute.