School Climate Walkthrough Tool Selected for Semi-Final Round of VITAL Prize Challenge

In this round of the NSF funded VITAL Prize Challenge, Dr. Jessica Hoffmann and her team of Dr. Craig Bailey, Jennifer Seibyl, and Olivia Martinez, all from YCEI, were awarded $20,000 of seed funding to help build out a new dashboard feature of the School Climate Walkthrough assessment app, a digital survey built for and with middle and high school students to take stock of their school community’s safety, relationship quality, diversity, and teaching quality. The Semi-Final Round of the VITAL Prize also included an assigned Educator Mentor to co-design with and weekly training on strategies for design applications for excluded needs and learner variability.

“Our goal with the School Climate Walkthrough is to build an engaging, useful, accessible assessment of school climate, with a comprehensive, automated report. We wanted to do all of this while also maintaining scientific rigor by incorporating theory and validating the tool with existing measures of school climate,” says Jennifer Seibyl, Program Manager for Assessments at the YCEI For example, the comprehensiveness of an assessment is difficult to make brief enough to be practical. Much of the team’s efforts have gone towards working with students and educators to understand their biggest needs (e.g., brevity, utility, helpful results, and support for next steps), and generate new solutions.

The School Climate Walkthrough has undergone many iterations: from a paper-and-pencil version to a traditional online survey, to an interactive story-telling game, and finally to the current prototype, which includes a dynamic, interactive, engaging online assessment that provides a comprehensive and accessible reporting feature. Over 30,000 students across the United States have taken the School Climate Walkthrough throughout the various iterations, and each cohort has provided invaluable input to continuously improve the tool. You can read about the process of developing the School Climate Walkthrough here.

Digital Promise will announce teams that are moving on onto the Final Round later in November. If you would like to read more about why our middle and high schools need the School Climate Walkthrough, you can read a review of the existing measures here.