Investigators
Tess Gregory
Project Description
Fostering student wellbeing is increasingly seen as a central objective of education, however few education systems across the world monitor the wellbeing of their students. The SA Department for Education is an exception to this rule, conducting an annual wellbeing collection referred to as the Wellbeing and Engagement Collection (WEC). The aim of the WEC is to help teachers, school leaders and policy makers better understand and support the wellbeing and engagement of their students.
The aim of this project and technical report is to provides a history of the WEC from an initial pilot with Grade 6 students in 2012 to 2013, to a full system wide collection with Grade 4 to 12 students in 2019. The report describes changes to the collection over time, such as the expansion to include students of different ages and participation rates in different collection cycles. The WEC report also describes the survey used to measure student wellbeing and engagement, how it has evolved and changed over time the psychometric properties of the different measurement scales using the 2019 WEC data.
This information will be highly relevant to academic researchers who are using the WEC data in their research projects.
This project was undertaken when Institute researchers (Tess Gregory) formed part of the Fraser Mustard Centre, a previous collaboration between researchers at The Kids Research Institute Australia and policy makers at the South Australian Department for Education, aimed to improve research translation.
Funders of the project
South Australian Department for Education
External collaborators
Sally Brinkman (University of South Australia)