Assessing Parents' School Satisfaction

A team of researchers developed a new instrument to measure parents’ satisfaction with their children’s school.

User satisfaction is a crucial indicator for any organization, as it helps assess and improve performance based on qualitative feedback. And this is especially true for schools, because of the unique nature of the service they provide:

• Education is hard to measure. Enrollment, exam results and other quantitative variables do provide valuable information, but they also leave out important aspects of a school’s mission and are very hard to turn into an actionable plan.

 

• Education is a collaborative effort. School users (and this includes both students and parents) are not mere recipients but rather co-producers of its service (or “prosumers”.

​For these two reasons, schools may very well be the organizations for which reliable information regarding user satisfaction is most important. Yet, if parent surveys are quite common practice, few dedicated instruments have been scientifically designed and tested.

To fill this gap, a team of Italian researchers has recently developed the QUASUS (Questionnaire for the Analysis of the School User’s Satisfaction), which measures parents’ satisfaction with:

• Teaching-learning process (in terms of educational activities)
• Teaching output (in terms of knowledge and skills)
• Educational effectiveness (in terms of values and dispositions)
• Prosumerhsip (in terms of receptivity to parents’ concerns, demands, and expectations)
• Flexibility (in terms of adaptation to parents’ constraints)
• Equipment 

Concretely, the QUASUS consists in 35 questions to which parents are asked to answer using a six-point Likert scale (from “extremely dissatisfied” to “extremely satisfied”), plus 3 general questions on overall satisfaction:

1. Correct recognition of educational commitment
2. Quantity and difficulty of homework assignments
3. Ability to adapt the lesson to the level of the students
4. Credibility of the results achieved by the students
5. Commitment of the teaching staff
6. Information on the progress and the difficulties of the students
7. Collaboration among teachers
8. Promotion of values
9. Promotion of collaboration with peers
10. Training to respect the environment
11. Attention to the social context
12. Development of the autonomy of the pupils
13. Development of pupils’ personal skills
14 Development of critical thinking skills
15. Maintenance and state of conservation of the school
16. Quality of the logistic structures
17. IT and scientific equipments 
18. Aesthetic quality of premises
19. Dimension and equipment of the gym
20. Existence of external spaces usable by pupils
21. Quality of furnishings
22. Disabled-friendliness
23. Family participation in school initiatives
24. Inclusion of parents in school activities
25. Consideration of the opinions and proposals of the parents
26. Dissemination of initiatives aimed at pupils and parents
27. Existence of channels to make complaints
28. Flexibility of schedules
29. Opening hours to the public
30. Head teacher’s commitment
31. Secretarial services
32. Availability of the principal
33. Distance from the town
34. Availability during opening hours
35. Compatibility between school and parents’ schedules

Reference: Mossi, Ingusci, Tonti, and Salvatore, “QUASUS, A Tool for Measuring the Parents’ School Satisfaction”, Frontiers in Psychology, January 2019.​