The climate of school classrooms, shaped by a combination of teacher practices and peer processes, is an important determinant for children's psychosocial functioning and is a primary factor affecting bullying and victimization. Given that there are relatively few theoreticallygrounded and validated assessment tools designed to measure the social climate of classrooms, our research team developed an observation tool through participatory action research (PAR). This article details how the assessment tool was designed and preliminarily validated in 18 third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade classrooms in a large urban public school district. The goals of this study are to illustrate the feasibility of a PAR paradigm in measurement development, ascertain the psychometric properties of the assessment tool, and determine associations with different indices of classroom levels of relational and physical aggression.
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NIH-PA Author ManuscriptRecent research has shown that the social climate of classrooms can have a significant bearing on students' psychosocial functioning and adaptation during the elementary school years, including their social competence (Wilson, Pianta, & Stuhlman, 2007) ). In addition, an increasing number of bullying prevention programs have recognized the importance of the classroom climate and have developed classroom-based components to improve teacher responsiveness to interpersonal aggression and conflict situations among students (Doll, Song, & Siemers, 2004;Olweus & Limber, 1999). Despite the growing emphasis on enhancing classroom climate, there are few validated, theoretically grounded assessment tools that have been designed specifically to assess the social quality of classrooms and to ascertain actual mechanisms within these settings associated with student aggression. This article describes the development of a classroom-based observation tool that was designed to provide a brief index of classroom climate. We discuss the rationale behind its development (particularly as it relates to challenging urban classroom settings), its current psychometric properties, and its utility for aggression and bullying prevention programming and teacher training.Structured observations of student behaviors in the classroom are one of the most commonly used assessment methods by school-based practitioners (Shapiro & Heick, 2004). However, current observational practice has several limitations. First, professionals tend to rely upon informal and anecdotal observations as opposed to using systematic observational systems with predefined target behaviors (Volpe, DiPerna, Hintze, & Shapiro, 2005). Second, many classroom-based observation systems are often helpful in planning and monitoring the treatment of specific at-risk children (Volpe et al., 2005), but they do not generally provide information about the overall classroom environment, how teachers relate to their students, or the quality of the teaching and learning environment. The classroom observatio...
