Family Survey Instrument Available in Eight Languages

Panorama is excited to announce that the Family-School Relationships Survey is now available in eight languages. This family survey instrument can be used on Panorama's survey platform and can be downloaded as a free resource in English, Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, Vietnamese, Arabic, and Portuguese.

In April 2015, Panorama released Spanish translations of the Panorama Student Survey and the Family-School Relationships Survey. We received enthusiastic responses about the survey instruments in Spanish from schools and districts across the country. Many schools and districts asked us for translations in more languages to be able to reach their communities. This positive feedback was an important reminder of how essential it is for schools, networks, and districts to be able to communicate with stakeholders in a way that is comfortable for and accessible to them when we think about family engagement.

We have seen that survey instruments in translations are integral to facilitating meaningful discourse between families and schools; they can also help build consensus around setting goals and priorities for school, network, and district improvement. Jonathan Carvalho, Community Relations Manager at New Bedford Public Schools, which did community and family surveys in three languages this past year, experienced this first-hand.

“Because we’re an urban district in a vibrant and diverse city, it was really important to us that parents have the option to complete the survey in their language. So many of our families are English language learners. When we’re trying to engage them in sharing their experiences with us, we want them to be comfortable doing that and it helped us meet them where they are.”

—Jonathan Carvalho, New Bedford Public Schools (MA)

Offering the Family-School Relationships Survey in eight languages is important way for Panorama to support as many students and families as possible around the country and the world. These survey instrument translations will support collecting the family feedback that is key to improving school cultures and family-school relationships.

The translations of the Family-School Relationship Survey were produced using current survey translation best practices: making a forward translation from the original English into the target language, and then a reverse translation from the target language back into English. Once the forward and back translations were completed by different translators, they were reconciled and reviewed by both translators as well as a proofreader to confirm accuracy and fidelity to the original survey instrument. The translations are intended to be as “standard” as possible, and therefore do not reflect regional styles or patterns.

Are there other languages that you’d like the survey instruments translated into, or would you like to talk to our translation team? Please get in touch with the Panorama team at translations@panoramaed.com with questions and feedback.