Welcome to our site on Learning Polls for Secondary School students!
This website represents our on-going project to improve schools with the use of a polling and data feedback system we have devised.
This system has been field-tested at a number of schools across the United States. We have several published articles that describe our work. Links to these articles are available on the About Us page: [click here].
A basic premise of Learning Polls is to assess for schools the conditions of learning at each school location. At the foundation is the belief that adolescents need a voice in the matter of assessing the environments in which they learn. The polls allow their voice to be heard, systematically, anonymously and according to the NCLB mandate that students be asked and monitored as to their perceptions about how their school can best serve their needs as learners and as developing adolescents.
A list of the polls we have currently for use is listed in the Frequently Asked Questions section, [click here]. From this you can get a sense of how many polls we have and the range of topics we cover. For more detail on each poll, a school must contact us regarding their interest.
Our work fits perfectly with the processes set forth in schools called School Improvement/Continuous Improvement or similar terms to the same meaning. Committees for school improvement/continuous improvement are now part of every secondary level school in the nation. These committees need data to make decisions on how to assess school effectiveness and ways to improve or enhance effectiveness in the ways school assess their functioning, school safety, learning styles, access to internet, social interactions among students, etc. It is the students, our primary clients, who we need to ask. What they say in the polls is then considered by committees during their analyses and deliberations of school effectiveness.
We must learn to give adolescents a voice about their own education.