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Students, staff and parents
A school climate intelligence platform that turns data into action
See what your students, staff and parents are experiencing and know exactly what to do about it.
Direction turns a survey into results read against the norms, an alert when a category moves and an action plan built from the activities, resources and funding matched to that category. Run one schoolwide survey a year or a short survey to a small sample every month. The platform and the price are the same.
Built for the work your district already does
District level: the initiatives already in place
Every district already runs programs that depend on knowing how students are doing. Each one needs the same thing from a survey: a quick read, a comparison to something, and a next step. Direction gives all of them one platform, so the MTSS team, the safe schools office and the LCAP writer are reading the same categories from the same survey.
“The purpose of information is not knowledge. It is being able to take the right action.”
Peter F. Drucker
How it works
Four connected parts, one cycle
The survey is only the first step. A school moves through the four parts of Direction in order every time it surveys. The categories are chosen, the survey goes to the students, staff or parents you choose, the results come back the moment it closes, an alert flags any category that left its normal range, and the Resource Center supplies the response for that category. The next survey shows whether the response moved the number.
Survey Development Center
Pick the categories and the aligned questions, or use a university instrument. Send it online, on any device or on paper.
Data Analysis Center
Results the moment the survey closes, trended survey to survey and read against local, state and national norms.
The Alert
When a category leaves the normal band, Direction says so and points to where to look.
Resource Center
Activities, interventions, online supports and funding opportunities for every category in the database.
Trend data
When a trend spikes
One survey result is a dot. The same question asked again turns the dots into a line. Schools that want the line send a short survey to fewer than 10 percent of the campus each month, a different sample each time, so no student is surveyed twice. When the line leaves the normal range Direction fires an alert, the school responds from the Resource Center, and the next survey shows whether the line came back. Schools that survey once a year still get every result read against the norms, the alert and the resources.
Sample chart. The alert repeats each survey the line stays above the normal range.
Research
Build your own surveys or use ours
Every school can build its own surveys from a library of hundreds of questions organized by behavior category, with binary, Likert scale and multiple choice questions, skip logic, and English and Spanish versions. Direction also carries a series of surveys developed by university research teams, including school climate, student wellness, bullying, staff bullying and parent surveys. These instruments were built by Georgia Southern University, the University of Florida, the University of Oregon and Cal Berkeley, and every one of them is available to every school on the platform.
Bullying Suite of Surveys for students, staff and parents, with skip logic that points schools to the interventions their results call for.
School climate and student wellness instruments in student, staff and parent sets.
Likert scale school climate surveys in student, staff and parent sets.
Published research on Direction data informing district decisions.
Sample questions from the database
The platform
What you get with Direction
Direction is an intelligence platform, and the survey is only how the information comes in. Everything a school needs to act on what it learns is inside the same platform: the questions, the real-time read against the norms, the alert, the activities and resources matched to each category and the funding to pay for the response. A school does not leave Direction to build its action plan.
A clearinghouse of questions
Hundreds of questions written for education and organized by behavior category, from bullying and vaping to school connection and attendance. Build your own surveys or use instruments from university research teams.
Real-time data
Results the moment a survey closes. Trend lines run survey to survey, compared against local, state and national norms, filtered by participant group, exported to PDF, XLS and CSV for a board report or an LCAP.
Alerts that say where to look
When a category runs above the norm on a risk factor or below it on a protective factor, Direction issues an alert, whether or not anyone opened the dashboard that week.
Action planning inside the platform
Every alert points to the resource bank for that category. The school plans its response from what the data identified, inside Direction, and tracks whether the next survey moved.
Hundreds of activities and resources
Student-led activities and interventions for every category, topic overviews, online supports from government and university sources, and printable materials for staff development, parent nights and student lessons.
Funding opportunities
Grants and funding sources aligned to each category in the database, so the response the data calls for has a way to be paid for.
Why Direction
Built for school climate, not for surveys in general
A general survey tool hands a school a form builder and a spreadsheet. The school writes every question, has nothing to compare its numbers to, and is on its own once the results come in. Direction was built from the start for the people responsible for school climate, and the differences show up at every step.
| A general survey tool | Direction | |
|---|---|---|
| Questions | You write every question yourself. | Hundreds of questions written for education and organized by behavior category, plus instruments from university research teams. Build your own in the same library, in English and Spanish. |
| Comparison | Your results stand alone. | Every result is read against local, state and national norms built from schools answering the same questions. |
| Alerts | Someone has to notice. | Direction issues an alert when a category runs the wrong way, whether or not anyone opened the dashboard that week. |
| What happens next | A spreadsheet. | Activities, interventions, online supports and funding opportunities for the category that spiked, and the action plan built inside the platform. |
| Schedule | One survey, one spreadsheet. | Your schedule. One schoolwide survey a year, or a short survey to fewer than 10 percent of the campus each month that turns the results into a trend line. Either way the results are read against the norms and against the last survey. |
| Student privacy | Often tied to student accounts or email. | Anonymous by design and COPPA compliant. No personal information is gathered from students. |
| Cost | Per response, per seat or a district contract. | One subscription per school site. Unlimited surveys, unlimited questions, unlimited participants, unlimited activity development. |
Privacy
Student data privacy
Direction surveys are completely anonymous and compliant with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). No personal information is gathered from students. Surveys measure the student body and not the individual student, which is why a small sample of the campus is enough.
Anonymous
Students answer without an account. Nothing that identifies a student is collected.
COPPA compliant
Direction was designed for K-12 schools and follows the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.
Shared safely
Administrators, district and county officials and grant writers get view-only access to aggregate results and nothing else.
Who uses Direction
Counties and school districts across California
Some of the largest county offices and school districts in the state read Direction, alongside single school sites that started with one subscription.
“Direction Survey saves us a tremendous amount of staff and student time. We now can pick the questions we want to create a survey, administer the survey to every school in our district and immediately have data back to analyze within minutes.”