Use of Classroom Environment Assessments in School Psychology

Abstract

It is desirable today that school psychologists, in addition to being concerned with student achievement, give consideration to important psychosocial aspects of classroom environments. This paper makes several economical hand-scorable classroom environment instruments readily accessible to school psychologists and provides an overview of numerous past uses of these instruments including studies of the effects of classroom environment on student outcomes, use of environment variables as process criteria in evaluating educational innovations and teachers' practical attempts to use learning environment assessments to guide improvements in classrooms. Some applications of classroom environment assessments in school psychology are considered.

Teachers' differential behavior

“…Research on classroom climate (Fraser, 1986(Fraser, , 1987Fraser and Walberg, 1991;Walberg, 1976) has been particularly salient in its reliance on students' perceptions. Classroom climate had been measured in the past via objective observations, but today it is measured almost exclusively through students' subjective perceptions.…”

“…Researchers (e.g., Fraser, 1989) present convincing arguments justifying the superiority of students' perceptions for assessing learning environments and social climate. However, classroom climate questionnaires are not directly focused on teachers' differential behavior, although almost every climate questionnaire includes items focusing on students' perceptions of favoritism and preferential treatment (see Fraser, 1987).…”

Predicting Girls’ Learning Behaviour in Secondary School Mathematics Lessons from Motivational and Learning Environment Factors

“…Perceived Learning Environment. Various dimensions of perceived learning environment were assessed using the 25 items from Fraser's My Class Inventory (MCI) (Fraser, 1987). This consists of five items for each of the following five dimensions: cohesiveness (e.g.…”

“…Although Fraser (1987) reports information attesting to the reliability and validity of the MCI in an Australian context, it was decided to factor analyse the 25 items in this study to identify meaningful groupings of items. Principal component factor analysis Downloaded by [University of California Santa Barbara] at 01:27 14 June 2016 after varimax rotation identified four interpretable factors with eigenvalues of more than 1 and items loading more than 0.3.…”

“…It was decided, therefore, to explore the predictive relationships between aspects of perceived learning environment variables and self efficacy and intention variables. Those aspects of perceived learning environment shown in previous work to be significant were chosen; that is, aspects concerned with classroom relationships were whether pupils were satisfied with being in the class (class satisfaction); whether pupils have harmonious relationships with each other (class cohesion) and whether pupils come into conflict with each other (class friction) and those with personal development were whether pupils saw the work as difficult and there was pupil competition (Fraser, 1987).…”