Users' Guide
Field 6: Selected SALT
Survey Findings
(Teacher Responses)
» What You Are Looking At / What You Are Looking For
» Special to the District
What You Are Looking At This graph shows eight individual, item- or single question-level responses from the teachers’ SALT surveys, using only the ‘core’ teachers. (‘Core’ teachers are those who teach math, science, language arts and social studies.) These eight responses were chosen from among hundreds of teacher, student and parent responses because they are indicative of the ways and degrees to which schools support literacy, numeracy and efforts to reach out to parents and community as partners to help improve student achievement. What You Are Looking For Unlike the assessments, the SALT survey data have no absolute standards nor will such standards ever be set. You are looking for clues as to what school and classroom practices might be altered to improve student achievement in this school. A school might compare these responses to their school improvement plan to see if there is a gap between the school goals and the realities of the teacher responses. If the frequencies indicated in these responses already meet your approval, you will have to look elsewhere in the SALT data for information that would support the school’s efforts to move students closer to the 100% proficiency goal. Choosing Indicators from among the Vast Amount of Salt Survey Data Isolating a relatively tiny sample of SALT data for a public report is not something this data was originally designed to do. On the contrary, the survey instruments were specifically intended to give schools a very comprehensive picture of their functioning – their expectations, practices, climate, and etc. Still, the statewide SALT data seemed to indicate that some of the state’s major objectives — literacy, numeracy and strong partnerships with family and community — were under-supported in practice at many schools. Much discussion went into identifying the most effective indicators for evaluating how well schools were structured to meet the state’s goals. The indicators chosen are by no means the only survey responses that could apply to the goals, but at the state level, these responses seem to illustrate the school’s functioning in the selected areas most effectively.
Complicating the presentation of SALT survey indicators is that the SALT data are expressed on different kinds of scales — as percentages in tables, as straight numbers and as bar graphs that rise according to different scales. To make the most of the tiny space allotted on each school template, a single scale, in this case a frequency scale of teacher responses, seemed least confusing and most evocative of a school’s functioning at a basic, practical level.
Special to the District
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