Associations between students' perceptions of classroom environment and academic efficacy in Australian and British secondary schools

This digest found in

Pupil grouping and organisation of classes
Pupil Voice
Self evaluation
Mathematics

What does it mean to gather evidence about classroom environment?

The study aims were three-fold. The first was to investigate the relationship between classroom environment and academic efficacy. The second and third aims related to the nature of the measuring instruments used to assess classroom environment. The researchers wanted firstly, to validate scales from two different questionnaires and secondly, to determine how much scores derived from each of the two measuring instruments contributed to differences in academic efficacy.

Researching learning and teaching is always complex because of the dynamic nature of the interactions. Much research therefore focuses on interactions between individuals. But classroom environment research needs to attend to the interactions across all the individuals involved. This requires a sensitive tool to ensure that interactions are recorded and measured consistently. This is why the researchers used and compared measures through two different instruments. The first comes from a well established instrument called “What Is Happening In This Classroom?” (WIHIC). This aimed to measure the following factors:

WIHIC scale items and their descriptions

Scale Name	Scale description
Co-operation	The extent to which students co-operate rather than compete with one another on learning tasks.
Equity	The extent to which students are treated equally by the teacher.
Investigation	The extent to which skills and processes of inquiry and their use in problem solving and investigation are emphasised.
Involvement	The extent to which students have attentive interest, participate in discussions, do additional work and enjoy the class.
Student cohesiveness	The extent to which students know, help and are supportive of one another.
Task orientation	The extent to which it is important to complete activities planned and to stay on the subject matter.
Teacher support	The extent to which the teacher helps, befriends, trusts and is interested in students.

Whilst the WIHIC scale is comprehensive, it is not designed to study constructivism in classrooms. (A constructivist approach is one in which meaningful learning is seen as a cognitive process in which students make sense of the world in relation to the knowledge they have already gathered. Learners link new ideas to current knowledge and to understandings they have constructed, often clarifying their thinking through talking about it with others.) In order to measure factors more characteristic of this type of environment, the researchers’ questionnaire included three additional scales chosen from an instrument called “The Constructivist Learning Environment Survey” (CLES). These were:

CLES scale items and their descriptions

Scale Name	Scale description
Personal relevance	The extent to which school mathematics connects with students’ out of school experiences.
Shared control	The extent to which students are invited to share with the teacher control of the learning environment.
Student negotiation	The extent to which opportunities exist for students to explain and justify to other students their newly developing ideas.

The study found evidence to validate the measuring instruments used. They also found that the WIHIC scales accounted for a much greater proportion of group variance than the CLES scales. The findings are discussed further on the next page.