General Guidelines for Using WINSS Online Surveys
Project managers who choose to use any of the WINSS perceptions surveys should be aware of the following:
Open Records Laws
As a state agency, DPI is subject to open record requirements under s. 19.35 of the Wisconsin Statutes. The perception survey results on WINSS are maintained by the Department of Public Instruction and would therefore be made available upon request pursuant to the above statutory requirements. The department would encourage anyone requesting the survey results to contact the project manager. However, if requested, the department will provide direct access to the survey results. If this occurs, department staff will inform the administrator that the survey results have been shared.
Procedures to Ensure Proper Use of Surveys With Students
The DPI Student Services, Prevention and Wellness Team has developed a bulletin
to help school staff understand the legal parameters that must be considered when surveying students. Please review this bulletin before administering the WINSS School Climate Surveys to students.
Reliability
As a survey manager, you want to gather the most reliable data you can to gauge the perceptions of various groups of people in your school and community. To ensure that the results of your survey are reliable, try to survey at least 30 people, more if possible. If you are using the surveys as part of a needs assessment, be sure to survey community members as well as school staff. The more diverse the groups being surveyed are, the more people you will want to include in your sample. You may need multiple methods of recruiting survey takers so you have a representative sample of reasonable size. If you are interested in comparing results by subgroup (i.e. teachers, K-4 parents, African American survey takers) be sure that the people surveyed in each subgroup are representative of the subgroup as a whole and that number of people in the subgroup is as large as possible.
Maximizing Participation
Ideas for maximizing survey participation can be found at: http://goal.ncrel.org/winss/ideas.htm.
Confidentiality
The survey taking process is password protected. This means without your project password, a survey taker can not log on to take a survey. In addition, to ensure confidentiality for survey takers, when results are reported, no results will be reported for any group of 5 or fewer. The exception to this rule will be in the case of school administrators and board members where it is possible for the project manager to override that suppression. This will allow administrators and board members to compare their perceptions to others in the school community, a valuable comparison for conducting a needs assessment.
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