This release was issued prior to the joining together of Pearson NCS, Pearson Assessments, and the assessments division of AGS Publishing into a single business unit named Pearson Assessments (now Pearson's Assessment group).

New Survey Solution Maximizes Choices, Optimizes Results

SurveyTracker Plus Offers Unmatched Flexibility, Built-In Survey Library

Eagan, Minnesota, February. 15, 2006 — Pearson NCS, a leading provider of data management solutions, today introduced significant enhancements to its SurveyTracker Plus product line that offers survey users flexibility while improving efficiency and accuracy. Common applications include customer, patient or constituent satisfaction surveys, school and college course evaluations, and 360-degree employee reviews.

SurveyTracker Plus 5.0 and SurveyTracker Plus Email/Web 5.0 both offer survey users and respondents unmatched flexibility through multiple delivery methods, including scannable and non-scannable paper forms, three e-mail formats (HTML, form- and text-based), web, network, disk and on-site kiosk surveys. This flexibility improves efficiency and accuracy, and each solution includes powerful survey-writing capabilities from an integrated Survey Library, along with comprehensive reporting and analysis tools.

"To capture the best survey data and obtain the highest response rates, our updated SurveyTracker Plus 5.0 allows respondents to choose from the widest range of survey delivery methods," said John Harnett, president and CEO of Pearson NCS. "When customers and prospects spend valuable time completing a survey, we believe it should be as easy as possible,” comments Harnett. "Offering a variety of choices makes for a smarter, unbiased survey and delivers valuable results."

Limiting delivery methods limits results. For example, Harnett says e-mail and web surveys cannot effectively reach the one-third of U.S. adults without Internet access. And while 72 percent of adults between the ages 18 and 29 go online, this percentage drops to only 24 percent for Americans age 65 and older. Survey providers can give their respondents this wide choice of survey methods with confidence, knowing that a higher percentage of their responses will be collected, regardless of what method is selected. Written responses are captured exactly as they appear on paper, without time-consuming manual data entry, using exclusive "Image Clip" scanner capability.

Harnett says one of the greatest strengths of the enhanced Survey Tracker Plus 5.0 for survey users is the flexibility it offers. “We’re empowering our customers with a complete suite of tools to easily manage their survey project in-house. They can administer the entire process from their desktop, from creation and implementation through data collection and in-depth analysis,” explains Harnett. “Customers may also choose to outsource certain steps to us, leveraging our capabilities and expertise.”

The new Survey Library in Survey Tracker Plus 5.0 is an integrated, powerful suite of pre-written surveys – ideal for almost any organization – that can be easily modified to fit specific needs. Designed by experts and appropriate for either scannable or non-scannable projects, the Survey Library lowers survey development costs, reduces design times and empowers users in developing a high-quality survey. SurveyTracker also includes a Question Library for questions and scales, a Message Library for notes and instructions and an Image Library for logos and graphics.

For users, Survey Tracker Plus 5.0 offers the freedom to easily design and print custom scannable forms for optical mark read (OMR) scanning, with data collection by Pearson NCS scanners. Compared with manual data entry, scannable forms provide fast, automated results and unmatched data integrity.

With its audience sampling capability, Survey Tracker Plus 5.0 can create a representative subset of the audience list that provides statistically valid data in less time and at a lower cost. The audience list support feature enables demographic information to be imported or entered, streamlining the survey process for respondents – and showing respect for their time – while enhancing reporting options.

Users can choose from eight different reports, with flexible data-filtering options to meet virtually all data-analysis and reporting requirements. Each report can be easily customized, and then printed or output as a PDF document.

"This enhanced offering again highlights our broad capabilities, which is a core strength and unique advantage of partnering with Pearson NCS," added Harnett. "We offer our customers turnkey, in-house solutions like SurveyTracker Plus, or they can outsource their full survey project to us, or we can work to create a combination that meets their needs and budget."

About Pearson NCS

Pearson NCS, based in Eagan, Minn., offers a wide variety of data collection hardware, software, scannable forms and outsourcing services for business, healthcare, government and education. Pearson NCS is a business of Pearson Education, the world's largest education company, which in turn is part of Pearson, the international media company. Pearson’s other primary operations include the Financial Times Group and the Penguin Group.