OMB questions and responses

From: Sanders, Felicia

Sent: Wednesday, March 26, 2014 7:12 AM

To: Axt, Kathy

Cc: Ingalls, Katrina

Subject: RE: OMB Comments for: Evaluation of a District Wide Implementation of a Professional Learning Community Initiative

Here are the responses to the two general questions and to the embedded comments in the attached document (those responses are in the comment bubbles). I have attached a tracked copy of Appendix E that includes the comment bubbles and a clean version. Please let us know if you’d like us to add/modify anything. Thank you!

Two general questions:

1. Was the teacher survey piloted in any way? Does the study team have confidence that the teacher survey will produce valid and reliable responses? Is there any concern for social desirability bias, that is, teachers will want to answer positively?

The teacher survey was pretested with an independent sample of teachers (not from the same district) with PLC experience in order to refine our measurement scheme (this information is included in the methodological appendix). As for the concern about social desirability, please see response to the next question.

2. Can the items in the teacher survey be grouped by categories? It is a fairly long instrument and grouping may make the survey read better.

The reason we did not group items by categories was to avoid (or at least be able to assess) social desirability bias and verify that teachers actually engage with the questions they are being asked to answer (instead of marking responses to similar questions automatically). This way we can more objectively assess the consistency in which they responded to questions that belong in the same measurement scale.

Thank you,

Felicia