The Assessment of School Climate

Abstract

School climate measurement is a long-standing topic in educational research. This review article provides an overview and appraisal of school climate measures published between 2003 and 2013 in scientific journals. A search for published school climate instruments for secondary school students was made in three databases. Twelve articles meeting the inclusion criteria were identified and included. Each measure is described in terms of contents, and psychometric and formal quality criteria. Most of the reviewed measures showed good or acceptable results in reliability analyses but insufficient validity testing. Theory-grounding for measurement development is often missing. All instruments include items addressing the relationship among students and between students and teachers while the environmental-structural area is considered the least. This review provides a compact overview of recently published studies using school climate instruments that have also been tested psychometrically. This may be useful for schools, practitioners, and researchers.

Do inquiry-based teaching and school climate influence science achievement and critical thinking? Evidence from PISA 2015

“…School climate has been defined as a measure of the frequency of personal conflicts and treatment among people (Coyne 2012), and reflects the standards, goals, values, interpersonal relationships, training, learning, leadership practices, and organizational structures that are part of an educational organization (Ramelow et al 2015). A positive school climate encourages the development of students and the necessary learning for a more productive, satisfying, and participatory life in a democratic society (National School Climate Council 2010).…”

Adaptation and Validation of the School Climate and School Identification Measure-Student Scale (SCASIM-St) in a Sample of Chilean Adolescents

“…Despite a relative consensus regarding the benefits of school climate (Steffgen et al, 2013), its definition has a wide range of conceptualizations (Alonso-Tapia and Nieto, 2019) and a lack of consistent theoretical approaches (Ramelow et al, 2015). The studies with the greatest evidence and methodological robustness (Thapa et al, 2013;Rudasill et al, 2018) agree that school climate is a complex construct that must be measured from a multidimensional perspective.…”

The School Climate and Academic Mindset Inventory (SCAMI): Confirmatory Factor Analysis and Invariance Across Demographic Groups

“…The importance of school climate to child and adolescent adjustment as well as to overall academic and behavioral outcomes mandates the need for comprehensive and psychometrically strong assessment measures for this construct, particularly for schools (Lindstrom Johnson et al, 2019). A full review of school climate assessments is beyond the scope of this article (for reviews, see Ramelow et al, 2015;Olsen et al, 2018). These measures focus primarily on various dimensions of school climate described earlier in addition to ancillary variables such as substance use, school-community relations, and school identification (e.g., Lee et al, 2017).…”

“…Despite the availability of instruments to measure school climate, researchers have noted shortcomings with respect to many of these measures and their associated psychometric properties (Ramelow et al, 2015;Olsen et al, 2018). First, many measures in this area are not particularly comprehensive, instead focusing on limited numbers of constructs and items related only to safety, student-teacher relationships, and connectedness (Berkowitz et al, 2017).…”