Conference Program

The accelerated digitalisation of schools following the COVID-19 pandemic has intensified the presence of Big Tech corporations in educational settings, raising critical questions about child protection, data governance, and the everyday experiences of school communities. In Spain, as in many other national contexts, the adoption of digital platforms in primary education has proceeded without systematic participation from school actors, and with limited attention to how teachers and families understand, navigate, or resist these processes.

This paper presents the design and validation process of a survey instrument developed within the DigiProtEd project, a mixed-methods study exploring the socio-educational effects of digital platforms and datafication on child protection in Spanish primary education. The survey targets two key school actors -teachers and families of primary school students- across three autonomous communities (Catalonia, Castilla-La Mancha, and Comunitat Valenciana). Although the ambition is having representativity for as many autonomous communities as possible, at least in these three this would be granted.

A defining methodological choice in the instrument's design is its scenario-based structure. Rather than asking respondents to evaluate abstract propositions about technology, the questionnaire presents four situated scenarios grounded in recognisable school contexts: the institutional adoption of an official platform, inequalities in digital access when tasks are sent home, digital communication between teachers and families, and the generation and use of student data by the platform. Within each scenario, respondents are invited to assess their own practices, identify their concerns, and prioritise different values and responsibilities. This design serves a dual function: it captures empirical data on positioning and practice while simultaneously fostering reflexivity among participants, prompting them to articulate their own stance on platformisation and datafication processes that often remain tacit or unexamined.

The validation process combined expert review —drawing on specialists in education policy, digital rights, and primary education— with cognitive interviews with teachers and families, and a pilot administration in the two target communities. This process allowed the research team to refine item wording, assess the instrument's sensitivity to professional and social diversity, and evaluate the degree to which the scenario-based format effectively activated critical reflection rather than socially desirable responding.

The paper discusses the theoretical and methodological rationale behind the scenario-based approach, including its potential and limitations for studying platformisation and datafication from the perspective of school actors. Concretely, participants respond to grounded vignettes — such as a teacher navigating the adoption of a platform imposed by school administration, or a family confronting requests to consent to their child's data collection — that allow latent tensions to surface through practice-oriented reasoning rather than direct attitude measures. It also reflects on the ethical dimensions of designing a tool that, in the very act of measurement, may contribute to making visible processes —surveillance, data extraction, institutional pressure— that respondents have not previously framed in critical terms.

We argue that survey design in this field can itself be understood as a pedagogical and political act, one that places democracy and educational justice not only as objects of study but as values embedded in the research process.