Feb 28 -- The Institute of Education Sciences (IES), Department of Education (ED), invites comments by April 29. 2024 regarding the planned School Pulse Panel 2024-25 Data Collection.
The School Pulse Panel (SPP) is a data collection that was originally designed to collect voluntary responses from a nationally representative sample of public schools to better understand how schools, students, and educators were responding to the ongoing stressors of the coronavirus pandemic. Due to the immediate need to collect information from schools during the pandemic to satisfy the requirement of Executive Order 14000, an emergency clearance was issued to develop and field the first several monthly collections of the SPP in 2021 and a full review of the SPP data collection was performed under the traditional clearance review process in 2022 (OMB# 1850–0969). SPPs innovative design and timely dissemination of findings have been used and cited frequently among Department of Education senior leadership, the White House Domestic Policy Council, the USDA's Food and Nutrition Service, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Congressional deliberations, and the media. The ongoing, growing interest by stakeholders resulted in the request for dedicated funding to create an established NCES quick-turnaround data collection vehicle to become a mainstay for NCES. Funding for a mainstay collection was approved in late 2022, and NCES conducted a new collection during the 2023–24 school year. The purpose of this request is for a full review of the 2024–25 SPP data collection under the traditional clearance review process.
For the 2024–25 school year, the survey will ask school staff about a wide range of topics, including, but not limited to, staffing, learning recovery, tutoring, usage of federal funds, facilities, transportation, school environment issues, and overall principal and staff experiences, in addition to repeating items from the previous collections. It is planned that some new content will be rotated in (and some rotated out) monthly. This package includes details regarding the methodology and operations, as well as potential content areas and an item bank of potential items that can be asked any month.
The School Pulse Panel study is one of the few reliable, nationally representative, quick-turnaround studies that produces data on U.S. public schools. The sample design for the 2024–25 collection will roughly be the same as the 2023–24 collection, with 4,000 public elementary, middle, high, and combined-grade schools in an initial sample and 4,000 public elementary, middle, high, and combined-grade schools in a reserve sample. These schools will be selected via a random stratified sampling approach.
This submission will undergo a 60-day public comment period, followed by an additional 30-day public comment period. We continue to make revisions to the communication materials (Appendix A) and will present final versions for the 30-day comment period. Items in the Item Bank (Appendix B) that have not already been approved are consider draft and will undergo cognitive testing and revision before final administration. Final instruments for the August, September, and October 2024 surveys (Appendix C1) will be added to this package during the 30-day public comment, to be posted in late spring 2024. Final items will be submitted to OMB through a change request. Subsequent quarterly instruments will also be posted for 30-day comment in the months immediately preceding their administration, potentially followed by change requests to allow for small changes in items as deemed necessary by cognitive testing.
SPP:
https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/spp/
Draft survey instrument and technical documentation:
https://www.regulations.gov/docket/ED-2024-SCC-0032/document
FRN:
https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2024-04101