A Web-Based, Student-Centered Approach to School Climate Measurement

• In Event: The Development and Initial Validation of Four Ecologically Valid, Multidimensional, and Scalable Social-Emotional Learning Assessment Tools

Abstract

School climate is recognized as a valuable indicator of school health (National School Climate Council, 2007), and yet there remain considerable gaps in how it is measured. For example, school climate is most often measured as a school-level variable, assuming agreement across participants (Bergman & Anderson, 2010). Yet, students’ experience and perceptions of their school climate have been found to differ depending on their individual characteristics (e.g. Wang & Degol, 2016), sometimes resulting in greater within-school differences than between schools (Buckley, Subedi, Paek, Krachman & Gehlbach, 2019). Additionally, as with most in-school surveys, students are asked to complete surveys, but rarely hear about the results. Even less frequent is the inclusion of students in decisions about changes that might come as a result of any findings.

Here, we present data from the first year of work on building a new, web-based approach to measuring school climate: one that is student-centered, free to use, and simple to administer and interpret. The School Climate Walkthrough aims to empower students to complete a walkthrough of their school, just as an inspector would, noting which of 100 indicators of school climate they observe throughout a day (e.g., fair enforcement of cell phone rules in the hallway, images reflecting a variety of backgrounds, teasing or violence in the bathroom). The School Climate Walkthrough items were built through an iterative process, beginning with high school focus groups and drawing from the school climate domains outlined by the National School Climate Center (2007). Items were piloted with 507 students across nine diverse high schools, and refined through testing with an additional 218 students. A web-based beta version of the survey was built and play-tested with students and adults, and additional focus groups identified areas for further improvement to the application and to the structure for the automatic reports of aggregated data that students will receive.

Most notable from all the focus-group data collected to date are students’ and educators’ interest in the areas of school climate on which they disagree, and how this information can be harnessed for fruitful discussion, planning, and action. Presented in Table 1 are the results from the original nine high schools who completed the survey. To explore levels of agreement, scores were calculated by taking the absolute value of the difference between the percent of students that reported observing that item and the percent of students that did not observe that item. These scores range from 0 (low agreement) to 100 (high agreement). As expected, there were various areas of low agreement between students in a school, indicating that students within the same school can have quite different experiences and perceptions. Moreover, the school climate domain with the lowest agreement varied between the schools. Findings emphasize the importance of capturing individual perspectives and understanding the roots of demographic subgroup differences in school climate perceptions, and therefore using person-centered approaches (Rogers, 1987) when working to shift school climate.

Authors

• Jessica D. Hoffmann, Yale University

• Rachel Baumsteiger, Yale University

• Elinore Hills, The Yale Daily News Publishing Company

• Marc A. Brackett, Yale University