NTPS Change Memo

U NITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION

National Center for Education Statistics

April 15, 2016

MEMORANDUM

To: Robert Siviniski, OMB

From: Chelsea Owens, NCES

Through: Kashka Kubzdela, NCES

Re: 2015-16 National Teacher and Principal Survey (NTPS) Targeted Data Collection Emails Change Request (OMB# 1850-0598 v.14)

Per the January 2016 change request approval (OMB# 1850-0598 v.14), the new principal letter went through all of the standard forms design and mailing operations, and was sent to priority school principals and principals without a school coordinator. In addition to the principal conversion letter, a principal conversion email was mentioned in the previous change request. Below is the language from the first change request that references these principal emails:

“Additional Interventions to Encourage Response

As noted in the previous sections, principal name and email addresses were researched for those schools that will be mailed a final questionnaire package via FedEx in the coming weeks. As a reminder, the research was performed for:

• Charter schools, schools in towns, and schools with enrollment less than 100;

• Unproductive schools from the phase one field follow-up operation; and

• Recoded “refusals” from the phase one field follow-up operation.

There is no current plan in place to utilize these email addresses for data collection purposes. We believe that the best additional intervention that can be accommodated in the current cycle of NTPS would be to utilize the principal email addresses to follow-up with nonresponding principals after FedEx packages are sent out to encourage response.

Utilizing the principal emails would involve sending targeted, personalized emails to individual principals to encourage their school’s participation in the survey. To add an additional element of personalization, each email would be sent to the principal directly by an NTPS team member from Census or NCES (or a combination of both), rather than from a generic “NTPS survey team” name in the email signature. Census and NCES would jointly develop email templates to cover most of the schools’ scenarios, with the understanding that individual emails may need to be tailored specifically to the school’s unique situation.”

This change request contains the specific language for the proposed principal emails (see “Emails – Principal (RC)” on the last page of the updated Attachment B), which will be sent to the remaining 263 school principals for which we have outstanding forms. The purpose of this email is to address the principal directly and provide a clickable link to the outstanding questionnaires. There are three versions of the email: (1) for principals with only an outstanding Principal Questionnaire, (2) for principals with only an outstanding School Questionnaire, and (3) for principals with both questionnaires outstanding. We received feedback from our call center staff that principals have been requesting the links to the questionnaires via email, which leads us to believe that this approach may help principals more easily access and complete the questionnaires online. This request does not impact the estimated respondent burden nor the cost to the federal government for the NTPS 2015-16 study.

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