Design and results of a statistical survey in a school

Abstract

The competition between different schools in the same area and the required quality standards necessary to be rated in a satisfactory way by the National Ministry of Education, imposes to schools the activation of self assessment instruments to monitor the activities and the degree of customer satisfaction. In particular it is crucial to measure the customer satisfaction related to the "Piano dell'Offerta Formativa" (P.O.F.), a document describing pedagogical, organizational and managerial choices of the school, the educational aims, the general objectives related to teaching activities and the resources provided to achieve them. To this purpose, were designed and implemented a set of questionnaires to be filled by students, teachers, personal staff and a parents' pool selected via a stratified random sampling process, to improve their response rate. The present paper proposes the applied approach to a broad audience, since a good data quality was achieved with this survey, and weak and strong points of the school were highlighted. Descriptive statistics, as frequencies and means, were used to summarize questionnaire responses. A logistic regression analysis has been performed to model the relationship between a binary outcome as students' attendance/not attendance to a specific school activity and some explanatory variables concerning school welcoming, relations, learning, teaching and involvement recognition. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.