Measuring Implementation in Schools: The Stages of Concern Questionnaire
Understanding how stakeholders feel about a new program or practice can play a key role in its successful implementation. The Stages of Concern Questionnaire (SoCQ), part of the Concerns-Based Adoption Model, offers a way for researchers, program evaluators, administrators, and change facilitators to assess teacher concerns about strategies, programs, or materials introduced in a school. Recently, SEDL has made the SoCQ available online, allowing change facilitators to customize the questionnaire with the name of the innovation, access data immediately, and sort data by subgroups.
The Concerns-Based Adoption Model
The Concerns-Based Adoption Model is a conceptual framework that describes, explains, and predicts probable educator concerns and behaviors as new initiatives are implemented. The following are the three principal diagnostic dimensions of the model:
- Stages of Concern: Seven different stages of feelings and perceptions that educators experience when they are implementing a new program or practice
- Levels of Use: Eight behavioral profiles that describe actions and behaviors of educators and groups as they use an innovation
- Innovation Configurations: Different ways an innovation may be implemented, shown along a continuum from ideal implementation or practice to least desirable practice
Assess Educators’ Feelings About New Programs or Practices
The SoCQ provides insight during the change process by measuring the perceptions of the educators who are involved in implementing a new program. By examining data gathered from responses to a 35-item questionnaire, change facilitators can better understand participants’ concerns. Facilitators can also consider ways to keep these concerns from becoming an obstacle to the new program’s implementation. By administering the questionnaire at the beginning of the change process and a second time after the process is underway, change facilitators can evaluate how participants’ concerns evolve over time.
Access Data Quickly
The online version of the SoCQ can be customized to a school or district’s needs and provides several benefits over using a manually scored version of the questionnaire.
- Controls at your fingertips. A survey coordination site allows the survey coordinator to customize an SoCQ, and see how many responses have been received so far.
- Easy to complete. Participants receive an e-mail with a link to the online survey, which they can complete at their convenience.
- View the data immediately from multiple perspectives. People administering the survey can view the Stages of Concern (SoC) graph for the entire group, designated subgroups, or each individual participant.
The survey coordinator can add up to 10 subgroup questions to the SoCQ report for categories such as campus, subject taught, years at the school, or years of teaching experience. All the subgroup reports can be viewed immediately as the data come in.
Pricing
The SoCQ Online costs $0.50 per questionnaire completion, which can save time and money that would otherwise be spent in administrating the survey and analyzing the data manually. Education leaders can purchase access to the SoCQ today, arrange for its administration in relation to a specific change initiative, and be viewing automatically summarized data within an hour.
- Password (generated by the system to ensure it is unique)
- Cut-off date to stop accepting survey data for the cohort
- "Introductory" text seen at the start of the survey
- "Thank you" text to show at the end of the survey
- E-mail notification setting, which specifies if the admin wants to receive (or not receive) an e-mail when each survey is submitted
- Optional custom prompts that allow the administrator to collect other demographic information, if desired. For instance, the survey could prompt for how long the user has been employed at the school, or the prompt could ask for some personal identification (name, employee ID#) that would allow the administrator to know exactly who submitted each survey.
Watch a Demo and Order Online
Requires the free QuickTime player
- Accessing the SoCQ and customizing the questionnaire (video: 12 minutes)
- Reading the SoCQ reports (video: 9 minutes)
Order it online by visiting the product page at www.sedl.org/pubs/catalog/items/cbam21.html.
