Postsecondary Success Asset Map: A Toolkit for School Improvement

Preparing students for college and career starts in 9th grade and is a whole school responsibility that includes support from external partners working with students and staff before, during and after school. Getting a wide variety of well-informed participants will provide the most balanced PSAM data with the greatest breadth and depth of insights and perspectives.

There are five sections of the survey, one for each asset area.

• Assets 1 to 4
  • All school staff should be invited and encouraged to complete Assets1-4. It is important to include perspectives from teachers, administrators, counselors, advisors and other support staff from all grade-levels.
  • It is highly recommended to invite community partners, particularly those providing college and career readiness supports to any of your students.
• Asset 5—these questions are to be completed by only those individuals who are on the team leading the college and career improvement work in the school. As discussed in Step 1: Get Started, a specially designated PSAM team or a committee of an existing team, representative of the school staff, is recommended.

Remind participants that the PSAM survey is relatively brief, taking approximately 30 minutes to complete and anonymous—your name will not be associated in any way with your answers.

A few technical notes to make things go smoothly with the survey

• The survey can be accessed from any web browser.
• Use the BACK and CONTINUE buttons to move within the survey. Do NOT use your browser buttons, as this could interrupt the survey and your responses could be lost.
• It is best if you can complete the entire survey without closing your browser window.
• If the survey is inactive for 60+ minutes, it will close and your answers may be lost.
• For some pages, you may need to scroll down to respond to all questions on the screen.
• At the end of each section, you can add any additional information or comments that you think would be helpful for the PSAM team to know.

Accessing, aggregating, and displaying your data

After all participants have completed the survey, a data report will be sent to the email designated to FHI 360 by the school leaders. The school will receive a survey report in an editable PowerPoint format with approximately 1 table per survey question, presented in an immediate, digestible format. In addition, your raw data will be provided in an Excel spreadsheet, providing you with the functionality to present your data in more customized graphs, charts, and tables. . This will require good Excel skills. If no such person is currently available in or to your school, we recommend working with a local partner, such as a local education fund (LEF), college or university, graduate student, or local business to get help using Excel to export, filter, and display the data in a format that will be user friendly for your school and partners. You may need to engage a person with expertise in exporting, filtering, and displaying data in Excel. If no such person is currently available in or to your school, we strongly recommend working with a local partner, such as a local education fund (LEF), college or university, graduate student, or local business to get help using Excel to export, filter, and display the data in a format that will be user friendly for your school and partners.

Here is a sample of how you can display the data from the PSAM survey.

Resource

Sample Data Graph