Professional Learning Communities Assessment-Revised (PLCA-R) Online

Authors: Dianne F. Olivier, Kristine Kiefer Hipp, Brian Litke (programmer)

Product ID: PLC-01 Price: $1 (minimum order of 25)
• Published: 2010    • Format: online survey

The Professional Learning Communities Assessment-Revised (PLCA-R) is a questionnaire that measures staff perceptions of school practices related to six dimensions of a professional learning community (PLC) and its related attributes. The questionnaire consists of statements about practices that can occur in schools. Respondents use a 4-point scale to indicate the degree to which they agree or disagree with each statement.

The PLCA-R reports scores along the following six dimensions:

  1. Shared and Supportive Leadership
  2. Shared Values and Vision
  3. Collective Learning and Application
  4. Shared Personal Practice
  5. Supportive Conditions-Relationships
  6. Supportive Conditions-Structures
Benefits of Using the Online PLCA-R:
  • Ease of use: The online Professional Learning Communities Assessment-Revised (PLCA-R) allows a coordinator to quickly customize and deploy the PLCA-R questionnaire as well as automatically report on the results as soon as the participants have completed the online questionnaire. Data are automatically graphed, and a mean and standard deviation are calculated for each dimension for the group, individual, or subgroup report being viewed.
  • Multiple views of the data: Scores are reported for individual participants for each dimension. Scores are also reported by dimension for the entire group as well as any subgroups that are defined. Report graphs can be added to an online clipboard that allows you to generate a custom multi-line graph that visually compares and contrasts the scores for different groups or individuals.
  • Customization: Up to 20 custom questions (up to 10 open-text questions and up to 10 controlled-answer questions) can be added to gather demographic information as well as to allow participants to select subgroup identifiers that are later used to view subgroup reports for slices of the data. Thus, a survey coordinator can define subgroups that allow the data to be viewed in isolation for other subgroups (i.e., you can view scores for teachers who have been teaching fewer than 3 years vs. experienced teachers; School A vs. School B; etc.)

Pricing:
The pricing is $1 per questionnaire completion, with a 25 questionnaire minimum order. Therefore, if you have 50 people whom you would like to complete the questionnaire, you would need to purchase a quantity of 50 (e.g. 50 questionnaire completions x $1 = $50). If you would like the same 50 people to take the questionnaire twice during the year, to see how their concerns change over time, you would need to purchase 100 questionnaires.

A quantity discount is offered for purchases of over 250 survey completions. Surveys above the initial 250 surveys will be priced at $0.75 per survey, and any surveys purchased above 500 survey completions will be priced at $0.50 per survey.

Please contact webmaster@sedl.org if you would like a demo account to preview the PLCA-R Online site.

Background information of the PLCA-R and copyright ownership:
Background information about the development and administration of the PLCA-R is available in chapter 4, “Assessing and Analyzing Schools as Professional Learning Communities” by Dianne F. Olivier and Kristine Kiefer Hipp, in the Rowman & Littlefield Education book Demystifying Professional Learning Communities: School Leadership at Its Best, ©2010. You can buy a copy of this book from the publisher, Rowman & Littlefield Education or from Amazon.com.

You can contact the editors and copyright holders of the book and the PLCA-R, by e-mail: Kristine Kiefer Hipp at kahipp@stritch.edu and Jane Bumpers Huffman at Jane.Huffman@unt.edu. For information about the PLCA-R, you can contact Dianne F. Olivier at dolivier@louisiana.edu. Through an agreement with the editors, SEDL is providing access to the online version of the PLCA-R.

Video Introduction to the PLCA-R Online