Dave Stuart Jr.

Teaching Simplified.

An Experimental Survey Tool for Measuring the Five Key Beliefs

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Dear colleague,

Though I'm surely not a survey-specialist-guy, I've developed a survey tool for measuring the Five Key Beliefs that I wanted to share today. It has given me reliable, actionable insights both times I've used it (Spring and Fall of 2025), so I'd like to give it to you in case it helps.

Here's the survey. (That link should prompt you to make a copy so your students' data remains private.)

How I Set It Up

I introduce it to my students very simply: “As your teacher, I am very interested in your honest experiences and feelings toward the work of learning we do in this class. I'm not sharing this with anyone else. Just be honest and don't overthink the questions. I'll give you about 10 minutes to do some thoughtful work here.”

The reason I collect student emails is that I want to be able to see this data for individual students. For me, the power of this tool is less about getting a general impression of the level of the Five Key Beliefs in the overall classroom and more about getting specific insights into specific students. I'll explain more about that below.

What the Survey Asks

The following questions are asked in a Likert scale format:

  1. I feel that my teacher cares about me as a person. (CR)
  2. I believe my teacher wants me to succeed. (CR)
  3. The work I do in this class is worth my time and effort. (VAL, EFF)
  4. When I work hard in this class, I see improvement. (EFF)
  5. I feel like I belong in this class. (BEL)
  6. My teacher takes time to connect with me individually. (CR, BEL)
  7. My teacher knows about my interests outside of class. (CR, BEL)
  8. My teacher notices when I'm struggling and offers help. (CR)
  9. I feel comfortable asking my teacher questions. (CR, BEL)
  10. My teacher remembers things I've shared. (CR)
  11. My teacher clearly explains why what we're learning matters. (CR, VAL)
  12. My teacher breaks down difficult tasks into manageable steps. (CR, EFF)
  13. Class time is well-organized and used effectively. (CR)
  14. My teacher shows enthusiasm for what he teaches. (CR, VAL)
  15. When I'm confused, my teacher helps me understand what to do next. (EFF)
  16. I believe my teacher is good at his job. (CR)
  17. I believe the work we're doing in [unit or class] is important. (VAL)
    • Here you'd want to insert your own class or unit(s).
  18. I believe that putting forth effort in [unit or class] will help me improve. (EFF)
    • Here you'd want to insert your own class or unit(s).
  19. I believe I can be successful on the AP test in May. (EFF)
    • Here you'd want to insert your own end-of-course assessment or project.
  20. In this class, I feel like I belong and fit in. (BEL)

(Those abbreviations above are for us teachers — CR questions indicate Credibility, VAL indicates Value, EFF indicates Effort/Efficacy, and BEL indicates Belonging.)

The survey ends with the following two open-ended questions:

  1. What is something that has helped you this school year to believe school matters?
  2. What is something you used to struggle with in this class that you no longer do? What facilitated this change?

What You Can Do With It

Once I get the results, I've enjoyed doing the following:

  1. First, look for students with low numbers — 1 or 2 — in any of the questions. These, to me, are cries for help. When a student clicks 1 or 2, they're saying, “This is an area where I'm having a hard time.”
  2. Then, do the Will to Learn thing that makes sense for those problem areas.
    • In some cases, it's really obvious what to do. (Question 6, for example, can be immediately remedied with some focused MGCs.) What I love most about this survey is that I can find cases in which immediate intervention (e.g., an MGC, checking in on the students' concerns about success, identifying kids who feel strongly that they don't belong) might help a lot and rather quickly.
    • In other cases, it can be a bit more puzzling, but I like those puzzles because they reflect what's going on in the hearts of my students. For example, if I find the average rating on Value questions is low, that's something I can experiment with using Value strategies (e.g., Mini-Sermons, Valued Within exercises) or Value-adjacent strategies (e.g., Woodenization)

So, I wanted to finally share this as some of the schools I've partnered with on PD have used it to good results, as have I.

Teaching right beside ya,

DSJR

P.S. Here's the survey link again in case you skimmed by it above.

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