Project Learning Tree Survey of Use
National scale education efficacy research project
Project Learning Tree has a network of educators and facilitators across North America that depend on the national PLT office to develop new educational resources. As part of this service, Project Learning Tree engages in a tri-annual research project to determine perceived efficacy of resources and current student / educator needs.
Design Case
Role: Lead Researcher
Goal / Problem
PLT's national office provides educational resources for educators across all of North America. One of the major challenges with this work is maintaining an awareness of how these resources are being used, who is using them, and what challenges these educators are experiencing.
What it is / Solution Description
To gain an understanding of the challenges faced by educators and their students, we designed a national-level survey. This survey had 4 primary goals
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Identify the most used and least used resources
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Identify the most common challenges facing educators
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Identify context-specific challenges faced by educators
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Determine the perceived effectiveness of resources
Hurdles / Challenges
Distribution of the research project was the largest challenge. The final survey was highly involved, taking approximately 10 minutes to complete. The project also had the added requirement of distributing to an effective cross section of educators, with a need to have responses from educators in each US state, a variance of rural/urban contexts, a variance in economic prosperity of area, and variance in formal vs non-formal educational settings.
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To meet this challenge we worked closely with both local and national organizations to target distribution to our required audiences.
Results and testing
Specific results of this project are proprietary.