Examining Use of the Schoolwide Expectations Survey for Specific Settings to Build Expectation Matrices: A Pilot Study

The Schoolwide Expectations Survey for Specific Settings (SESSS) is a free-access tool school leadership teams can use to gather opinions from faculty and staff regarding what student behaviors are critical for success in various school settings. While the SESSS has been used for over a decade to inform the building of schoolwide expectation matrix as part of their Comprehensive, Integrated, Three-Tiered model of prevention, little is known about the extent to which data from the SESSS informs the actual building of schoolwide expectation matrices. In this pilot descriptive study, we examined SESSS data from 10 elementary, middle, and high schools from two Midwestern districts in the United State to determine how much and which data from the SESSS were included in their expectation matrices. Using a standardized rubric to score each school’s inclusion rate of SESSS items, results indicated all schools included most items rated as critical for success by 75% or more faculty and staff. We discuss implications and future directions.