This brochure describes the American Educator Panels -- innovative online survey tools that provide unique sources of accurate information about educators' knowledge, attitudes, practices, and working conditions.
The American Educator Panels can run a survey for you and provide you with clean, weighted data files of completed responses afterward. We have recruited over 25,000 teachers, 8,000 principals, and 1,000 district leaders into the panels from across the United States using rigorous, probability-based sampling methods. Based on your needs, our statisticians will identify a sample to whom your survey will be administered. After your survey closes, the AEP team will provide you with a full set of technical documentation including the survey questionnaire, codebook, and a clean data file that has been weighted by statisticians to be representative of your target population and has undergone extensive quality assurance. In addition to surveys, you may also commission RAND to conduct interviews, analyses, and reporting of results.
The RAND AEP team can work with you to create a survey that meets your goals. If you are interested in working with us to survey the panels, please fill out this form, and we will get back to you about moving forward.
K–12 public school teachers of all subjects are invited to join the panels. The AEP also invites K–12 school principals and district superintendents (or their designees) to join the panels. Teachers, principals, and district leaders are invited to join the panels based on random, probability-based methods to ensure our panels mirror the population of U.S. teachers, principals, and district superintendents to the extent possible.
Yes, we can work with you to select a sample that meets your needs (e.g., teachers or principals in schools serving particular grade levels, teachers of particular subjects, or teachers in schools with particular demographics).
The minimum cost for running a survey of teachers or principals on the panels is $45,000, which is the cost of running a 10-minute survey and obtaining 1,000 completed surveys. The cost to add content to a survey of district leaders is $15,000 per minute with a range of two to five minutes’ worth of questions. The AEP also runs an Omnibus survey each fall that allows you to ask up to 20 items at a cost of $1,000 per item for the first 10 items and $625 for each item thereafter. Learn more from the AEP brochure and price list.
A typical survey is approximately 10 to 15 minutes in length, although the AEP can run surveys up to 30 minutes in length. Keep in mind that completion rates typically decrease for items toward the end of very long surveys.
As part of our AEP services, we provide you with a data file that includes selected, categorical demographic data about respondents and their schools. If you would like more fine-grained data that could identify respondents, you can request a restricted-access data file for a fee, so long as you sign a data use agreement, and agree to keep the data safe and confidential for the time period that you have it.
The AEP survey programming platform allows us to program a range of different types of survey items, from traditional, multiple-choice items to ones requiring complex skip patterns and innovative response categories (e.g., sliders or open-ended items). We have also fielded survey items that embed images, videos. and other response types. We can talk to you about the range of options that are possible to field through the AEP. Keep in mind that more complex survey items with more programming demands may increase the cost of your survey.
The American Association for Public Opinion Research’s (AAPOR) Transparency Initiative was implemented to ensure that important details about the methods used to conduct a survey are openly reported by the organization that fields the survey. For every AEP survey conducted, we provide deliverables documenting how the sample was drawn, the sampling error, the survey mode and language, the number of respondents invited to take the survey, the number who completed the survey, the completion rate (calculated following AAPOR standards), the weighting methods, and the exact wording of the questionnaire items answered by our panelists.
