Understanding student experiences provides an important tool to schools and districts as they work to improve the climate in their schools, and ultimately to improve student outcomes. The Nevada School Climate/Social Emotional Learning Survey (NV-SCSEL) is administered to students across the state of Nevada each spring, and is used by schools to measure and understand their students’ perceptions of key school climate topic areas, including physical and emotional safety, relationships, and cultural and linguistic competence, as well as students’ perceptions of their social and emotional competencies. In addition, data from the NV-SCSEL are used by the Nevada Department of Education (NDE) to help understand student needs across the state.

The NV-SCSEL survey is aligned to the ED School Climate Surveys (EDSCLS), providing an opportunity for scores from the NV-SCSEL to be compared directly to the performance-level benchmarks developed by the U.S. Department of Education.

AIR supports NDE in their school climate survey efforts by working directly with schools and districts to prepare for and administer the survey each spring. After each survey administration, AIR provides survey results to schools, districts, and NDE through several products, including:

• School-level survey reports. These PDF reports are made available to schools in as little as three days from the end of their survey window, these reports provide school-level scores for each of the NV-SCSEL topics overall and disaggregated by student characteristics, item-level response distributions, and links to resources.
• School-level trend reports. These PDF reports display trends in school climate scores overall and by student characteristic for each year that the school participated in the NV-SCSEL survey. 
• NV-SCSEL Peer Matching Tool. This online interactive tool that allows users to select a school of interest and identifies the most similar schools from across the state that are most similar based on characteristics of the schools and the students they serve. The tool provides comparison data on school climate and social and emotional competencies between the target and peer schools, and allows users to customize the way that matches are determined.
• NV-SCSEL Interactive Data Tool. This online interactive tool displays data at the school, district, and state levels, overall and by student subgroup. In this tool, users will find:
  1. The most recent survey results, overall and by student subgroup
  2. Trends over time for schools that participated in multiple survey administrations
  3. A detailed breakdown of the percentage of students (overall and by student subgroup) that perceive the school environment in each performance-level benchmark category
  4. Item-level results
  5. Resources to assist schools in using data to drive climate improvements

For more information, contact Samantha Neiman (AIR) or Amber Reid (Nevada Department of Education).