Data analysis is pivotal for making change. Numbers can tell stories. It’s critical that data is collected and presented reliably and without bias. So, when students are offered the chance to give their opinion through surveys, they expect their perspectives to be heard. Yet, when the data is presented back to students, many feel like it’s not representative of their actual experiences.

Two recent surveys students were asked to fill out were the No-phone-vember survey and student ambassador designed developmental relationships survey created last semester. In both cases, the survey data was presented back to the student body in an assembly.

The student response to the No-phone-vember survey was largely negative. The data presented, however, was skewed to display a more positive consensus aligning with the administration’s wants. For example, one question of the survey asked students to rank how much they think a no phone policy would affect their learning on a scale of 1-5, with 1 being negative and 5 being positive. In the assembly, the data presented claimed that 54.7% of students voted positive, with a number between 3-5. The issue here is that students believed 3 represents a neutral position. Including it with 4 and 5 skews the data to suggest a false narrative.

Towards the end of the 2023-24 school year, administration asked for help from students to create a developmental relationship survey that would be sent out to students and faculty. The results of the quite extensive survey were presented back to the student body. The assembly only included a fraction of the questions, leaving a lot of the survey unaddressed. The data felt nitpicked and unclear of the goal it was trying to achieve. A majority of the data was kept private, preventing interpretations from being made. Additionally, the student ambassadors who designed and presented the survey were prohibited from sharing the data, further proving the lack of candidness in the data collection process.

The ability to generate student opinion is undeniably of value. For these surveys to be useful, though, the data has to be presented in complete transparency. Students have the right to see the raw data and generate their own interpretations, and the admin needs to be willing to show the statistics, whether positive or negative. Presenting the uninterpreted data can be as simple as putting it in an email or google drive with the students. When the data is presented without being nitpicked to fit a narrative, there is more opportunity for students to fulfill the opinion they intended to voice in the survey initially.

Data is only as useful as what is done with it. If the sole purpose of the data is to handpick the parts that fit a desired perspective, then it will not be as effective as it can be. Transparent representation of the student opinion is a key first step to using data to make change in the school community. If aggregated data is planned to be used to make change, students need to have unfiltered access to it.