@CSchrauf1 guest post on @WaukeshaNorth1 Gallup Student Poll

The Gallup Student Poll

Creating hope, building engagement, and boosting student well-being at North High School

In October of 2014 students at North High School Participated in the Gallup Student Poll, a total of 664 students participated in the poll. For more than 70 years, Gallup has built its reputation on delivering relevant, timely, and visionary research on what humans around the world think and feel. Gallup’s research has shown that hope, engagement, and well-being are the key factors that drive students’ grades, achievement scores, retention, and future employment.  

Gallup researchers targeted hope, engagement, and well-being because these three variables met the following criteria.

1) They can be reliably measured.  2) They have a meaningful relationship with or impact on educational outcomes.  3) They are malleable and can be enhanced through deliberate action.  4) They are not measured directly by any other large-scale survey.

The Gallup Student poll is based on the idea that schools and communities need to work together from an understanding of what is right with students, rather than what is wrong.  By measuring students’ hope, engagement, and well-being, the Gallup Student poll provides a tool that educators and community members can use to assess efforts aimed at increasing the high school graduation rate of preparing students for a promising future.

Item Analysis

A majority of our students are confident that they will graduate from high school, there is an adult in life who cares for them, and they know how to get good grades.  Our students also feel that they will be able to find a good job, while Gallup does not define what “good” means, it will be vital for North to continue to develop school and business partnerships to allow students opportunities for school-to-work experiences as well as internships.  Areas that need focus are helping students focus on goal setting and problem solving.  We will need to explore using our Northstar Norms, Academic Excellence sessions, and classroom instruction to develop goal setting strategies and problem solving skills.  

Item Analysis

Our students report having a best friend at school. It will be important to continue to develop programs that promote positive peer relationships, our Northstar Norms and Academic Excellence session are two such programs that will be instrumental in sustaining positive student relationships.  

The areas of concern focus on student homework, recognition, and student strengths.  Our students feel that 54% of our staff makes schoolwork important. This leaves a significant percentage of our students to feel that our staff does not make schoolwork important.  40% of our students do not feel that they have received recognition for doing good school work and 30 % do not feel that North High School builds on the strength of each student. To address these concerns, in the short-term, the data that we have received from the Gallup Student Poll will be shared with our faculty with the purpose of making a very immediate impact in the area of recognizing students for good school work, continuing to develop our personalized learning strategies, and for students to build upon their strengths as learners.  Long term we will continue to focus professional development opportunities around personalized learning and instruction for faculty, promoting positive student/staff interactions, and promoting post high school career and educational opportunities.

Item Analysis

It is important to define what Gallup means by thriving, struggling, and suffering. To be considered thriving a student has positive perceptions about the present and future, good health, strong social support system, and engagement in school.  A student who is considered struggling does not have positive thoughts about the present and future, lacks basic needs, and has a weak social support system.  Finally, a student who would be considered suffering has negative perceptions about the present and future.

Our focus areas in this section would pertain to students being treated with respect, which ties to our engagement data.  We will once again use our Northstar Norms team to facilitate growth in students feeling respected.