Now: CALL Development is back in full swing with the new school year. For those following or participating in the validation study, a quick update is in order. If you have any questions at all, Mark Blitz is going to be contacting all of our schools in the coming weeks to personally let you know about the development process and timelines for piloting.

Ongoing: CALL is shifting to a full support staff. Over the last couple weeks Dr. Halverson and Dr. Kelley have been meeting with the universities’ Survey Center that does survey development across the institution. For initial pilots over the last couple years we have used a platform developed by Shree Durga so that all adjustments and management happened ‘in house’. As we move to scale in the coming months, the Survey Center provides the support and staff needed to administer CALL nationwide and on demand. Durga will be overseeing the system porting process and guiding the training of the Survey Center staff to be CALL experts too. With Dr. Blitz completing the revisions to the survey, we are at the perfect point to make the transition and prepare for a slate of pilot schools.

2011: The University of Wisconsin Survey Center provides more than just back end support. Being experts in survey design, they are ready to help with marketing, support, and layout of the product to best serve the school and make CALL as easy to use as possible. They will also be helping with semantics and clarity in the questions themselves, the best way to order the questions, and consult on the most accurate ways to give users item options. All of this work is beginning in September and we expect to be ready to roll out pilot school participation again in 2012.

2011: Data management and construct building is still enjoying the addition of Dr. Camburn and Jason Salisbury. They just finished with the “In/Out” analysis testing that the database produces data accurate to what was entered into the system. Currently they are building an item-by-item export which will give us the ability to report percentages for each response item (% of respondents that answered “b”), as requested by last year’s pilot principals. Coming up will be a full Rausch analysis of CALL’s constructs.

2012: In the new year we will be opening up a collection of pilot school live beta tests. Drs. Halverson, Kelley, Mason, Blitz, Marsha Modeste, and Seann Dikkers will be setting up and visiting cooperating schools as they test run the system and feedback process in the new year. Live tests will begin in January.

2012: Feedback is being build in concert, starting with a reflective build that allows pilot principals to see the raw data provided from their school. As the analysis and construct work is done this year, formative feedback will weigh leadership tasks against student learning for each school and build clear interpretations of the data for principals to have at their disposal too.

sd