Twentieth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Science

Abstract

School climate, defined as the quality and character of school life, is a construct that has been discussed as important to students’ educational experiences for the past century. However, the measurement of this construct has been elusive, with the past decade resulting in a broad measurement scheme consisting of aspects of school safety, student engagement, and the school environment, including access to services. Concurrently, there has been interest in broadening school accountability metrics beyond merely academic success, recognizing the important role that schools play in child and adolescent development. This session presents the development of a pragmatic measure of student-reported school climate which further distills a previously validated 30-item measure, that was built on the US Department of Educations’ model of school climate (Bradshaw et al., 2014; Lindstrom Jonson et al., 2019). A form of this measure has been utilized in a variety of countries, including Mexico, Columbia, Portugal, Indonesia, and Malaysia. Using a variety of cutting-edge measurement techniques, we present the empirical support for this pragmatic measure, which is valid and representative of the fuller school climate measure. The overarching goal is to create an abbreviated version of this previously validated school climate scale which is nimbler and more pragmatic for use by both researchers, practitioners, and policy makers. In this way we hope to facilitate more routine assessment of school climate across countries, furthering our understanding of its determinants as well as interventions to improve it and students’ educational experiences.