Background

Research on classroom environments has focused historically on its psychosocial dimensions – those aspects of the environment that focus on human behaviour in origin or outcome (Boy and Pine, 1988). The strong methodological tradition of research within this field has been to conceptualise environments in terms of Murray’s (1938) beta press  – the perceptions of the milieu inhabitants (e.g. students in classrooms)– with instruments assessing particular dimensions of the environment (e.g. teacher support). This research tradition is within a positivistic research paradigm with context-specific instruments assessing particular dimensions of the learning environment.

One of the strongest areas of classroom environment research has been the study of links between classroom environment and student cognitive and affective outcomes. Because of the ethical dilemma of deliberately manipulating environments in a true experimental design, almost all environment-outcomes research has used ex post facto designs and correlational data techniques. Results of studies conducted over the past 30 years have provided convincing evidence that the quality of the classroom environment in schools is a significant determinant of student learning (Fraser, 2007). That is, students learn better when they perceive the classroom environment more positively. Importantly, many of these studies have controlled for background variables with students’ perceptions of the classroom environment accounting for appreciable amounts of variance in learning outcomes, often beyond that attributable to background student characteristics.

Recent studies have substantiated this pattern. Kerr, Fisher, Yaxley and Fraser (2006) established positive relationships between classroom environment and attitudinal outcomes in Australian science classes. Similarly, Telli, Cakiroglu and den Brok (2006) found positive links between scales of the What is Happening In this Class questionnaire (WIHIC) and students’ attitude to biology in Turkish secondary schools.

Because most classroom environment studies involve students nested in classes, the unit of analysis issue has been an on-going concern for classroom environment researchers. Historically, most studies have used either the student as the unit of analysis and ignored class membership or aggregated at the class level and used the class as the unit of analysis (see Dorman, 2008). The present study preserves the nested nature of the data by employing multilevel analysis. Additionally a structural model that fits the data was developed.

Aims of the Study

·   To validate scales of the What Is Happening In this Class (WIHIC) questionnaire and scales to assess academic efficacy, attitude to subject, and attitude to computer use;

·    To use multilevel analysis to identify classroom environment dimensions that predict academic efficacy, attitude to subject, and attitude to computer use, and

·   Develop a model of the relationships among classroom environment scales and the three outcome scales through the use of structural equation modeling.

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