Examining the Utility of the Schoolwide Expectations Survey for Specific Settings (SESSS): A Data-Informed Approach to Developing Expectation Matrices

Abstract

To best support all students’ academic, behavioral, and social needs, an integrated systems approach is necessary. In such systems, all faculty and staff ideally recognize student success is a shared responsibility and collaborate in a data-informed process to define common student behavioral expectations to facilitate success academically, behaviorally, and socially. By defining behavioral expectations, clarity is provided for all students regardless of skill set, allowing equitable access to all areas of instruction. In this dissertation, Chapter 1 frames the need for clearly defined student expectations within three-tiered models of support for both instructional and non-instructional settings. Chapter 2 reviews the literature and determined most schools in published studies used a leadership team to build expectation matrices, sometimes obtained faculty and staff feedback, and rarely used a data-informed decision making process including faculty and staff input. Chapter 3 and 4 explore educator priorities of behavioral expectations in classroom and non-instructional settings—a previously unstudied area of inquiry—for students as measured by the Schoolwide Expectations Survey for Specific Settings (SESSS; Lane, Oakes, & Menzies, 2010). Data are analyzed from a cohort of 10 schools that participated in a year-long comprehensive, integrated, three-tiered (Ci3T; Lane, Oakes, & Menzies, 2014) model of prevention professional learning series. Results indicated educators across school levels (elementary, middle, high) had similar views on what skills should be prioritized for student success, with significant differences found for the hallway setting. Additionally, participant gender and professional development on behavior screeners predicted mean scores for the hallway setting. Chapter 5 discusses implications of these findings and future directions for research in this area.