written by Gabriella Staykova
The COVID-19 crisis exposes and exacerbates pre-existing inequities in our education system that aren’t being reported enough. Through a mixed methods student-led research approach, we aim to shed light on the student experience of navigating the pandemic in order to translate it into informed policy and practice decisions to better support the most marginalized students in our school system. The project began with a youth-designed survey generated nearly 13,000 responses from all of Kentucky’s 120 counties.
This week, the quantitative team ran the analysis for every single report we plan to create, a total of eleven. While this was something we expected to take a long time, we were able to run the analysis in only four days. Though we haven’t yet completed the data visualization or developed many of our conclusions, we are much farther along than we anticipated we would be at this point in the summer. We have now started to create the first cooperative report for the Kentucky Educational Development Corporation, which encompasses nearly half of our survey-takers. All analysis has been inputted into a Google Sheet, and we’re developing a template for our report into which we can quickly input our data. Once the template is complete, subsequent cooperative reports will take much less time, so we’re optimistic that we’ll be able to get our valuable data to policymakers within the next few weeks!