A coding rubric for school mission statements
To better quantify, summarize, and compare school mission statements, our team developed a school mission statement coding rubric using emergent coding.
Through an iterative development process, random samples of school mission statements were reviewed by independent research teams to extract their dominant themes. The research teams then met and established consensus on the major themes present across the mission statements. From these themes, a preliminary coding rubric was developed. To test this new rubric and coding scheme, researchers independently coded new samples of school mission statements and compared their results for reliability. Finally, we provided this rubric to a new sets of raters to independently rate samples of school mission statements. Through these reliability trials, we found acceptably high levels of interrater agreement suggesting that different raters could consistently and reliably apply our rubric (i.e., Cohen’ kappa > .70).
Major Themes in School Mission Statement Coding Rubric:
Each letter (A, B, C…K) represents the 11 major themes we encountered in school mission statements. Within each of these themes we also developed sub-categories that further summarize school mission statements (represented by numbers 0, 1, 2, 3…).
Using this coding rubric, we have found that nearly all school mission statements can be easily evaluated across 11 distinct possible categories/themes.