DEVELOPMENT OF A SCHOOL—LEVEL ENVIRONMENT QUESTIONNAIRE
| Date | 01 January 1983 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb009866 |
| Pages | 21-39 |
| Published date | 01 January 1983 |
| Author | A. JOHN RENTOUL,BARRY J. FRASER |
| Subject Matter | Education |
THE JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL ADMINISTRATION
VOLUME XXI, NUMBER 1 WINTER, 1983
DEVELOPMENT OF A SCHOOL-LEVEL ENVIRONMENT
QUESTIONNAIRE
A. JOHN RENTOUL AND BARRY J. FRASER
The School-Level Environment Questionnaire (SLEQ) is a new instrument
measuring teachers' perceptions of the following eight psychosocial dimensions of
the environment of primary or secondary schools: Affiliation, Student
Supportiveness, Professional Interest, Achievement Orientation, Formalisation,
Centralisation, Innovativeness and Resource Adequacy. Noteworthy features of the
SLEQ are its consistence with the literature, coverage of Moos's three general
categories for conceptualising all human environments, salience to practising
teachers, specific relevance to schools, minimal overlap with classroom environment
instruments, and economy. Administration of the SLEQ to two samples of 83 and 34
teachers, respectively, revealed that each seven-item scale possessed satisfactory
internal consistency and discriminant validity. Preliminary use of the SLEQ provided
evidence of its usefulness in research into the effects of school-level environment on
classroom-level environment and on teachers' pedagogical attitudes.
Over the last decade or so, the concept of school environment or
climate has appeared in the educational literature with increasing
frequency.1 This term has been taken by Tye2 to mean a set of factors
which "gives each school a personality, a spirit, a culture". The study of
school environment is clearly important since it is likely to contribute to
understanding and improvement of the school's functioning, and since the
school environment is likely to affect satisfaction and productivity within
the school.
This article makes a contribution to the study of school environment by
describing the development and validation of a new instrument, the
School-Level Environment Questionnaire (SLEQ), which measures
teachers' perceptions of psychosocial dimensions of the environment of
the school. Before describing the actual development of the SLEQ,
discussion in the following sections is focussed on the important distinction
between school-level and classroom-level environment, and on a review
of the main approaches to and existing instruments for measuring school
environment. Finally the paper reports validation data from the
administration of the SLEQ to two separate samples of teachers, and
reports some initial results from research into relationships between school-
level environment, classroom-level environment and teaching attitudes.
A. JOHN RENTOUL is Principal of St. Andrew's Presbyterian Boys School, Christchurch,
New Zealand. BARRY J. FRASER is Head of the School of Curriculum Studies, Western
Australian Institute of Technology, Perth, W.A. 6102.
22 School
Environment Questionnaire
SCHOOL-LEVEL vs. CLASSROOM-LEVEL ENVIRONMENT
An important distinction can be drawn between school-level and
classroom-level environment.3 Although some commonalities exist, the
school environment can be considered as distinct from and more global
than classroom environment. For example, whereas classroom climate
might involve relationships between teachers and their students or among
students, school climate might involve teachers' relationships with other
teachers, the head of department and the principal. Also, student
perceptions are commonly used when measuring classroom environment,
but they are seldom used in measuring school climate because it is felt that
students would be unaware of many aspects of the school-level
environment.
A particularly noteworthy point is that classroom-level environment
research is based on different theoretical and conceptual foundations from
school-level environment research. The theoretical underpinnings of
classroom environment research are reviewed in recent works such as
Moos,4
Walberg,5 Fraser6 7 and Fraser and Walberg.8 On the other hand,
school environment research
—
which is reviewed in detail later in this
article - has tended to be associated with the field of educational
administration and to rest on the assumption that schools can be viewed as
formal organisations.9 Furthermore, it has been quite rare for either
empirical studies or literature reviews to embrace both classroom and
school environment.
Moos's Social Climate Scales10 recognise the distinction between
classroom-level and school-level environment and provide two separate
instruments, one to measure classroom environment and one to measure
school environment. Whereas the Classroom Environment Scale
measures student perceptions of characteristics of their classroom (e.g.,
task orientation, teacher control), the Work Environment Scale can be
used to measure teachers' perceptions of aspects of their school
environment (e.g., staff support, work pressure). In other research,
however, the classroom and school environment are sometimes confused
or confounded. For example, Johnson and Johnson11 assume that "the
school environment is largely the sum of the classroom environments
within the school." This approach has been adopted by several
workers12 13 who have measured school environment using a classroom
environment instrument in which the word "class" is simply replaced by
"school".
THREE APPROACHES TO STUDYING HUMAN ENVIRONMENTS
Three of the different methods delineated by Moos14 15 for
conceptualising and measuring human environments are referred to as
dimensions of organisational structure, personal characteristics of milieu
inhabitants and psychological characteristics and organisational climate.
Although the SLEQ's development drew mainly on prior work on
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