What Leader in Me Results Tell You and What the MRA Cannot See
Your campus runs Leader in Me. The hallways carry the habits. Students hold leadership roles and keep leadership notebooks. Then budget season arrives and a board member asks the fair question. Is it working?
Most campuses answer with the Measurable Results Assessment. It is the right place to start. It is also worth knowing exactly what kind of evidence it gives you, and what kind it does not.
What the Measurable Results Assessment is
The Measurable Results Assessment, or MRA, is the measurement tool that comes with Leader in Me. Leader in Me describes it as "a validated survey and reporting system." It gathers input from students, staff, and families. Schools that administer it each year can track their progress over time.
MRA results fall into three areas. Leadership covers staff and student leadership development along with family engagement. Culture covers school climate, student empowerment, and relationships across the school community. Academics covers goal achievement, academic mindsets, and life readiness skills.
What MRA results are good for
A survey is the right instrument for climate and belief. If you want to know whether students feel trusted, whether staff believe they can lead, or whether families feel welcome, you have to ask them. No observer can see a belief.
The MRA also repeats every year, so you can watch a trend. A campus where student empowerment rises three years in a row has learned something about its culture. Keep administering it.
What a survey cannot see
A survey records what people report. It does not record what a student did on a Tuesday morning when the plan fell apart and somebody had to speak up.
Those two kinds of evidence can disagree. A student can agree that they listen before they speak and then talk over every teammate in a group task. Another can rate themselves low on leadership and be the one the group turns to when things go wrong. Neither student is lying. Each one is reporting how they see themselves.
That is not a flaw in the MRA. It is the boundary of every survey. Your improvement plan probably names behaviors such as collaboration and communication. A survey tells you how people feel about those behaviors. It cannot show you the behaviors.
Four questions to ask of your Leader in Me data
- Does any of our evidence show what students did, or only what they reported?
- Can we point to a specific moment when a student used a habit under pressure?
- Does our evidence use the same words our improvement plan uses?
- Would it survive a reading by our most skeptical board member?
If your answer to the first question is only what they reported, you have a gap. It is a common one, and you can close it without changing your program.
Put behavioral evidence beside the MRA
We don't replace your leadership program. We measure it. On a school mission day, a starship bridge comes to your campus and crews of five to six students fly a live mission. The Mission Analysis System transcribes the crew's voice traffic, labels each line by station, and pairs it with what was happening in the mission at that moment.
The result is a record of behavior. It shows who shared information, who confirmed an order before acting, and who kept raising a problem until the crew responded. Your students practiced the habits all year. The mission gives them a place to use those habits while someone keeps a record.
Read mission reports the way you read the MRA, with their limits in view. The reports are formative. They describe crews and roles, and they never grade an individual child. They cover one mission on one day. Set them beside your MRA results as a second kind of evidence, not a replacement for the first.
Mobile Space Adventures is not affiliated with or endorsed by FranklinCovey or Leader in Me. Descriptions of the Measurable Results Assessment come from Leader in Me's public pages as of September 2026.