People-Centered Benchmarking of Smart School Ecosystems: A Study with Young Students from Aveiro Region

This paper proposes a smartness benchmarking process capable of comparing the smartness dimensions in different school ecosystems in each stakeholder’s perspective. The process uses a mixed-method approach supported by ASLERD smartness questionnaires used to gather stakeholder opinions with closed and open questions organized into eight different smartness dimensions. All these dimensions inform stakeholder’s motivations and needs considering their relationship with the ecosystem’s territory, its institutions, and the people that share it. Quantitative data from closed questions is used as a valorization indicator of related opinions in open-ended questions. The methodological approach adopted for the benchmarking process flows as a result of the iterative relational analysis of these three modules: (i) descriptive statistics (opinion valorization) calculation; (ii) statistical deeper probing with nonparametric tests; and (iii) qualitative pertinence processing and clustering of issues/problems per smartness dimension. The benchmarking process was tested with three cohorts of seventh-ninth grade students from three different schools in the Aveiro region, Portugal. The data was gathered in May/June 2018 at Jose Estevao school (n1 = 156), School No. 2 at Sao Bernardo (n2 = 60) and at Estarreja school (n3 = 81). Results contain evidence of process validation as a multilevel inspection benchmarking solution and reveal that the process can validate the affordance of the questionnaires. Results depict a misinterpretation of one of the questions in two different data processing phases, situation that was validated with the relational analysis of this data. The mixed-method methodological approach produces different results, shown in this paper with different degrees of complexity, from a holistic perspective to a detailed clustered subjective opinion of a cohort’s specific population.

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