Nevada School Climate / Social Emotional Learning Survey

Understanding student and staff experiences provides an important tool to schools and districts as they work to improve the climate in their schools, and ultimately to improve student and staff outcomes. The Nevada School Climate/Social Emotional Learning Surveys (NV-SCSEL) are administered to students and school staff across the state of Nevada each fall and are used by schools to measure and understand their students’ and staffs’ perceptions of key school climate topics, including physical and emotional safety, relationships, and cultural and linguistic competence, as well as students’ perceptions of their social and emotional competencies (SEC) and teachers’ self-assessments of their SEC instructional practices. In addition, data from the NV-SCSEL are used by the Nevada Department of Education (NDE) to help understand student and staff needs across the state.

The NV-SCSEL surveys are aligned to the ED School Climate Surveys (EDSCLS), providing an opportunity for scores from the NV-SCSEL to be compared directly to the performance-level benchmarks developed by the U.S. Department of Education.
 

AIR Support for the Nevada School Climate Survey Efforts

AIR supports NDE in their school climate survey efforts by working directly with schools and districts to prepare for and administer the surveys each fall. After each survey administration, AIR provides survey results to schools, districts, and NDE through several products, including:

• NV-SCSEL Survey Reports. These 508-compliant PDF reports provide school-level scores for each of the NV-SCSEL topics overall and disaggregated by respondent characteristics, item-level response distributions, and links to resources.
• NV-SCSEL Peer Matching Tool. This online interactive tool that allows users to select a school of interest and identifies the most similar schools (i.e., “peer schools”) from across the state based on characteristics of the schools and the students they serve. The tool provides comparison data on school climate and social and emotional competencies between the school of interest and their peer schools and allows users to customize the way that matches are determined.
• NV-SCSEL Interactive Data Tool. This online interactive tool displays data at the school, district, and state levels, overall and by student subgroup. In this tool, users will find:
  1. The most recent survey results, overall and by student subgroup
  2. Trends over time for schools that participated in multiple survey administrations
  3. A detailed breakdown of the percentage of students (overall and by student subgroup) that perceive the school environment in each performance-level benchmark category
  4. Item-level results
  5. Resources to assist schools in using data to drive climate improvements

In 2023, NDE and AIR undertook a standard-setting process to develop Nevada’s Standards for School Climate. Schools can now use cut scores to determine whether their school’s climate needs improvement, is adequate, or is excellent based on expert review of the content of the survey. These scores will help schools to not only identify improvement priorities but also see exactly where their school falls relative to expert-identified standards for school climate.

For more information, contact Kyosin Kang (AIR) or Laronica Maurer (Nevada Department of Education).