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 did the study find out about the relationship between classroom environment and student self-belief?

Students reported a range of views about how far they felt able to achieve their goals in mathematics. School year groups of students in the study were significantly more likely to have high levels of confidence in their ability to understand and tackle mathematics tasks or have a “can do” attitude if they perceived their classroom environment to be:

task orientated - it is important to complete activities planned and to stay on the subject matter;
equitable - students are treated equally by the teacher;
co-operative - students co-operate rather than compete with one another on learning tasks;
cohesive - students know, help and are supportive of one another; and
supportive – the teacher helps, befriends, trusts and is interested in students.

The study analysed the results at both an individual and a group level. The group results are reported above and can be summarised as: fair, supportive, task-orientated working environments appear to promote a “can-do” attitude in students.

For individuals, the relative importance of particular aspects of classroom environment differed from the group analysis, as shown below.

Table showing the factors most highly correlated with academic efficacy for each type of analysis.

(The figures are simple correlation coefficients – i.e. the closer the number is to 1, the more closely one factor is linked to another; in this case, the relationship between each factor near the top of the table and academic efficacy is stronger than the link between those at the bottom and academic efficacy.)

Individual analysis		Year group analysis
task orientation	.37 ***	equity	.52 ***
involvement	.31 ***	task orientation	.50 ***
investigation	.29 ***	cooperation	.33 **
equity	.24 ***	teacher support	.28 **
student negotiation	.23 ***	student cohesiveness	.28 **
teacher support	.20 ***	involvement	.22 *
co-operation	.16 ***	student negotiation	.17
personal relevance	.15 ***	investigation	.10
shared control	.15 ***	personal relevance	.07
student cohesiveness	.14 ***	shared control	- .12

*** Significant: p<.001 – the result is 100 times that which could be expected by chance alone.

** Significant: p<.01

* Significant: p<.05

No star: not significant

The authors noted that, although analysis at an individual level led to significant associations with student self-efficacy in mathematics, these correlations were small. They also pointed out that “using the individual as the unit of analysis can provide spurious results because an unjustifiably small estimate of the sampling error is employed in tests of significance.” They therefore concentrated discussion of their findings on the group results.

Nonetheless, they noted in passing that some factors emerge as important when the analysis is carried out at the level of the individual that did not emerge as important when carried out at the level of the year group. These were:

involvement - student attention, interest, participation and enjoyment;
investigation – how much students used problem solving and investigation skills; and, to a lesser extent,
student negotiation – the extent to which opportunities existed for students to explain and justify their newly developing ideas to other students.

Which measures helped to explain increase in efficacy best?

The authors were interested in the ability of the two different measuring scales to account for differences in student efficacy. They found that the three CLES scales contributed very little to differences between student efficacy scores. More of the differences (38%) in student efficacy were explained by the seven WIHIC scales. So, in this study, the instrument designed to measure constructivist aspects of the classroom contributed little to explaining student differences in self-belief.

The authors also used statistical analysis to check the validity of the scales. The results showed that the scales were valid measuring instruments.