Christian School Management joined forces with Precision Consulting to carry out primary research within our own schools. The intent was to develop questions that would be most useful to Christian schools and to provide our-industry-norms giving comparators for any individual school’s scores.
The CSM Teacher Experience survey was developed and validated to identify school climate, roles and responsibilities, and family engagement. These scales were from the Family-School Relationships Survey, used to gather feedback in an attempt to engage families into the school community. The survey was adapted from the work developed at Harvard University by Dr. Hunter Gehlbach and his research team at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
In the pre-pilot phase of the study, based on a sample 397 of parents of students, a 17-factor model was identified, indicating that the variations in the data were primarily driven by these factors. A total of 58 items were linked to these constructs, with the number of items for each construct ranging from two to six. These items were measured on different five-point scales. In this pilot phase, the 17-factor model was evaluated using CFA based on a sample of 168 parents of students from seven Christian schools. These schools were: Billings Christian School, Columbia Christian School, Fremont Christian School, Gainesville Preparatory School, Grace Christian School, Muskegon Christian School, and RSM Christian School.
The results of the CFA revealed that the model provided an adequate level fit to the data as indicated by fit indices. However, it was found that there was a poorly fitting item with a standardized loading of less than .50. After excluding this item and rerunning the CFA, all standardized factor loadings were calculated to be greater than .50, indicating that there were no poorly fitting items. This model provided an adequate fit to the data. The level of reliability of the 57-item instrument as determined by Cronbach’s alpha was found to be excellent (a = .934).