This section describes the differences between the Survey domain included in the previous TPDM release (v0.7) and the current release (v0.8), where it has been included as part of the core Ed-Fi Data Standard.

Background

The Survey domain was initially developed to meet the needs of Teacher Preparation Providers within higher education. Since its debut in the Ed-Fi ecosystem, interest in the Survey domain grew from its original higher education teacher preparation space to the entire Ed-Fi community.

To address this, we published a Request For Comments (RFC) which brought Survey from a TPDM-specific domain into the Ed-Fi Data Standard. Upon approval of the RFC, the Survey domain was included in Ed-Fi Data Standard v3.2.0-c. With the v0.8 release of TPDM being based upon data standard 3.2.0-c, the Survey domain has been removed from TPDM.

The version of the Survey domain within core differs slightly from the model in TPDM v0.7. This article details the differences between the two versions of the Survey domain to support an easy transition to the latest version.

Bug Fixes

Replace NumericChoice and TextChoice with ResponseChoice (TPDMX-122)

A common way to present a survey is by supplying a range of expected values for a response rather than just free-form text. For example, a Likert scale where the expected answers would fall in the range of: 

• 1 - Strongly Disagree
• 2 - Disagree
• 3 - Neither Agree nor Disagree
• 4 - Agree
• 5 - Strongly Agree

In this scale, 1 is the actual value presented and "Strongly Disagree" is the human-readable value. While Survey in TPDM v0.7 could represent a case like this, NumericChoice and TextChoice were separate and unrelated fields, so there was difficulty in aligning the numeric and text data when both were present. The only way an implementation could reliably have 1 = "Strongly Disagree" was to be sure that the numeric values and text values were ordered properly before they were loaded.

Updates made in TPDMX-122 added ResponseChoice, a new entity to the survey question which contained fields for both NumericChoice and TextChoice (renamed to NumericValue and TextValue respectively) as well as a sort order field. This now means that every text or numeric value entered may have a matching numeric or text response. Since the TextValue and NumericValue fields are all optional on ResponseChoice, an implementation can still have just text or just numeric values. 

Add support for multiple selection answers for survey question responses (TPDMX-125)

The original intent for Survey allowed for survey questions that have multiple answers. SurveyQuestionResponse only allowed for a single numeric and/or a single text response value. With TPDMX-125, we have corrected this by updating the NumericResponse and TextResponse values to be collections.

Namespace Changes

To increase security on resources that cannot necessarily be tied to an education organization, the data standard has the concept of a namespace. A namespace is a URI-formatted string (e.g., http://ed-fi.org) that helps determine who has access to a specific record. If an entity has a value of http://ed-fi.org, only API clients that have been specifically given access to that namespace will be able to perform API operations on that data. See Platform Dev Guide - Security for more details on ODS / API security operations.

Entity Adjustments

Term Descriptor Replaced with Session Entity

When it was originally created, the designers of the Survey domain used a term descriptor to designate the period of time that the survey was meant to represent. In the K–12 space, term descriptors have fallen out of favor and the Session entity is now more widely used. In the transition from TPDM to core, Survey was adjusted to use the Session entity.