Teacher Perceptions of School Climate: A New Instrument and Validity Study

• In Event: Division H Research in Progress Session

Abstract

School climate has been considered to be strongly related to student success. However, teachers have been ignored as a critical informant of school climate. Also, scholars have paid varying degrees of attention to its multimensionality property. As Wang and Degol (2015) have proposed a thorough definition of school climate, this study seeks to solve these problems by addressing three questions: How was Wang and Degol’s definition of school climate represented across the existing instruments? How was Wang and Degol’s definition used in conjunction with these instruments to build a new instrument? How well does the new instrument measure school climate? Using the data from School Effectiveness in Indiana study, this study aims to build a sound scale of school climate and uses Rating Scale Model and Rasch Tree approach to assess its validity, which will provide a better understanding of teacher perceptions of school climate to educators and policymakers.

Authors

• Rui Jin, University of Kentucky

• Joseph Waddington, University of Kentucky

• Kelly Bradley, University of Kentucky