Theme: Numeracy, Classroom organisation, Self evaluation
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Associations between students’ perceptions of classroom
environment and academic efficacy in Australian and British
secondary schools
Dorman, J. and Adams, J., Anglia Polytechnic University, UK.
Westminster Studies in Education, Vol. 27, No. 1, April 2004
http://taylorandfrancis.metapress.com/link.asp?id=7w6yyum92v9pgaqf
Do particular elements of classroom environment help students develop a
“can-do” attitude in mathematics?
There has been increasing interest in the field of classroom environment recently. Many
readers will be aware of the Hay McBer website ‘Transforming Learning’, which offers an
interactive tool that teachers can use to measure and improve the climate in their own
classrooms. This study of the links between classroom environment and students’
beliefs in their ability to succeed is therefore topical for many schools.
Both the environment of the classroom and student beliefs about their capacity to
achieve their academic goals (academic efficacy) have been found to have an effect on
student learning. The researchers in this study set out to explore relationships between
the two fields and to determine what specific aspects of classroom environment had the
strongest effect on student academic efficacy in mathematics. They showed that equity,
task orientation and teacher support were all linked to students’ confidence that they
could learn well (academic efficacy) in mathematics.
The researchers used statistical analysis to compare measurements of student
academic efficacy in mathematics with their perceptions about various aspects of their
classroom environment. They investigated attitudes to mathematics held by over 2,600
students aged 12 to 18 in British and Australian schools and compared their belief in
their mathematics ability with their perceptions of classroom climate.
The digest provides further information about how different classroom environments
seem to be linked to student academic efficacy.
Keywords:
United Kingdom; Australia; Key Stage 3; Secondary schools; Pupils; Mathematics;
Classroom organisation; Classroom environment; Beliefs; Attitudes; Teacher-pupil
relationship; Self evaluation
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Contents
What does it mean to gather evidence about classroom environment? Page 3
What did the study find out about the relationship between classroom
environment and student self-belief? .............................................
Page 4
What did the researchers conclude from the findings? ................
The study aims and design .............................................................
What are the implications for head teachers and teachers? .........
Where can I find out more? .............................................................
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Page 3
What does it mean to gather evidence about classroom environment?
The study aims were three-fold. The first was to investigate the relationship between
classroom environment and academic efficacy. The second and third aims related to the
nature of the measuring instruments used to assess classroom environment. The
researchers wanted firstly, to validate scales from two different questionnaires and
secondly, to determine how much scores derived from each of the two measuring
instruments contributed to differences in academic efficacy.
Researching learning and teaching is always complex because of the dynamic nature of
the interactions. Much research therefore focuses on interactions between individuals.
But classroom environment research needs to attend to the interactions across all the
individuals involved. This requires a sensitive tool to ensure that interactions are
recorded and measured consistently. This is why the researchers used and compared
measures through two different instruments. The first comes from a well established
instrument called “What Is Happening In This Classroom?” (WIHIC). This aimed to
measure the following factors:
WIHIC scale items and their descriptions
Scale Name
Scale description
Co-operation
The extent to which students co-operate rather than compete with
one another on learning tasks.
Equity
The extent to which students are treated equally by the teacher.
Investigation
The extent to which skills and processes of inquiry and their use in
problem solving and investigation are emphasised.
Involvement
The extent to which students have attentive interest, participate in
discussions, do additional work and enjoy the class.
Student
The extent to which students know, help and are supportive of one
cohesiveness
another.
Task orientation
The extent to which it is important to complete activities planned and
to stay on the subject matter.
Teacher support
The extent to which the teacher helps, befriends, trusts and is
interested in students.
Whilst the WIHIC scale is comprehensive, it is not designed to study constructivism in
classrooms. (A constructivist approach is one in which meaningful learning is seen as a
cognitive process in which students make sense of the world in relation to the knowledge
they have already gathered. Learners link new ideas to current knowledge and to
understandings they have constructed, often clarifying their thinking through talking
about it with others.) In order to measure factors more characteristic of this type of
environment, the researchers’ questionnaire included three additional scales chosen
from an instrument called “The Constructivist Learning Environment Survey” (CLES).
These were:
CLES scale items and their descriptions
Scale Name
Scale description
Personal
The extent to which school mathematics connects with students’ out of
relevance
school experiences.
Shared control The extent to which students are invited to share with the teacher
control of the learning environment.
Student
The extent to which opportunities exist for students to explain and
negotiation
justify to other students their newly developing ideas.
The study found evidence to validate the measuring instruments used. They also found
that the WIHIC scales accounted for a much greater proportion of group variance than
the CLES scales. The findings are discussed further on the next page.
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What did the study find out about the relationship between classroom
environment and student self-belief?
Students reported a range of views about how far they felt able to achieve their goals in
mathematics. School year groups of students in the study were significantly more likely
to have high levels of confidence in their ability to understand and tackle mathematics
tasks or have a “can do” attitude if they perceived their classroom environment to be:
 task orientated - it is important to complete activities planned and to stay on the
subject matter;
 equitable - students are treated equally by the teacher;
 co-operative - students co-operate rather than compete with one another on
learning tasks;
 cohesive - students know, help and are supportive of one another; and
 supportive – the teacher helps, befriends, trusts and is interested in students.
The study analysed the results at both an individual and a group level. The group
results are reported above and can be summarised as: fair, supportive, task-orientated
working environments appear to promote a “can-do” attitude in students.
For individuals, the relative importance of particular aspects of classroom environment
differed from the group analysis, as shown below.
Table showing the factors most highly correlated with academic efficacy for each
type of analysis.
(The figures are simple correlation coefficients – i.e. the closer the number is to 1, the more
closely one factor is linked to another; in this case, the relationship between each factor near the
top of the table and academic efficacy is stronger than the link between those at the bottom and
academic efficacy.)
Individual analysis
Year group analysis
task orientation
involvement
investigation
equity
student negotiation
teacher support
co-operation
personal relevance
shared control
student cohesiveness
.37 ***
.31 ***
.29 ***
.24 ***
.23 ***
.20 ***
.16 ***
.15 ***
.15 ***
.14 ***
equity
task orientation
cooperation
teacher support
student cohesiveness
involvement
student negotiation
investigation
personal relevance
shared control
.52 ***
.50 ***
.33 **
.28 **
.28 **
.22 *
.17
.10
.07
- .12
*** Significant: p<.001 – the result is 100 times that which could be expected by chance alone.
** Significant: p<.01
* Significant: p<.05
No star: not significant
The authors noted that, although analysis at an individual level led to significant
associations with student self-efficacy in mathematics, these correlations were small.
They also pointed out that “using the individual as the unit of analysis can provide
spurious results because an unjustifiably small estimate of the sampling error is
employed in tests of significance.” They therefore concentrated discussion of their
findings on the group results.
Nonetheless, they noted in passing that some factors emerge as important when the
analysis is carried out at the level of the individual that did not emerge as important when
carried out at the level of the year group. These were:
 involvement - student attention, interest, participation and enjoyment;
 investigation – how much students used problem solving and investigation skills;
and, to a lesser extent,
 student negotiation – the extent to which opportunities existed for students to
explain and justify their newly developing ideas to other students.
Which measures helped to explain increase in efficacy best?
The authors were interested in the ability of the two different measuring scales to
account for differences in student efficacy. They found that the three CLES scales
contributed very little to differences between student efficacy scores. More of the
differences (38%) in student efficacy were explained by the seven WIHIC scales. So, in
this study, the instrument designed to measure constructivist aspects of the classroom
contributed little to explaining student differences in self-belief.
The authors also used statistical analysis to check the validity of the scales. The results
showed that the scales were valid measuring instruments.
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What did the researchers conclude from the findings?
The researchers concluded that teachers need to ensure their classrooms are high
quality teaching and learning environments. Student confidence was likely to be raised
in classrooms characterised by high levels of co-operation, harmony, genuine teacher
support, student cohesiveness, task orientation and equity. Teachers who dwelt on
student failures rather than helping them to build progression and who created an
environment characterised by competition and conflict did not improve levels of student
confidence.
Two particular concepts have been found in other research to have a positive effect on
student learning. The first is constructivism, in which students make sense of the world
by linking new ideas to understandings they have already built up. The second is pupil
dialogue, which proposes that pupils develop their understanding through discussion.
There is a broadly accepted view that constructivist learning environments support
academic efficacy. So the researchers were surprised that their results showed little
variation in student academic efficacy that could be accounted for by the CLES scales
specifically intended to look at constructivist classrooms.
One possible explanation, proposed by the researchers, is that constructivism is
concerned with critical thinking and higher order learning, whereas academic efficacy
concerns one’s ability to perform specific academic tasks. They suggest that it is
feasible that constructivism engenders a degree of uncertainty which, in a traditional
school system which values certainty, could create a loss of confidence in students.
The researchers extended research on classroom environment by linking it to student
academic efficacy. They suggest that there is a close practical relationship between the
two and that people interested in classroom environment should also be interested in
academic efficacy. They state that a substantial body of research has indicated that
both classroom environment and efficacy are strong predictors of student success
(Dorman, 2002; Bandura, 1997). The researchers suggest that future research should
try to unravel the relationship between the three. In particular, they ask to what extent
either of the following questions would help to identify the most effective way forward.
Does classroom environment have an effect on academic efficacy, which in turn affects
student learning? Or, do student perceptions of how able they are to make progress in a
given academic field shape their perceptions of their classroom environment in that
subject?
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The study aims and design
The study aimed to explore links between classroom environment and self-efficacy:
specifically, how students perceived the learning environment of their mathematics
classrooms and how this related to their own perceptions about their level of
competence in the subject. They reviewed other research in the fields of academic
efficacy and classroom environment and undertook empirical research to investigate
whether specific aspects of classroom environment were linked to measures of student
academic efficacy.
2651 mathematics students in Years 8,10 and 12 from nine Australian and sixteen
British secondary schools took part. They were asked to complete two questionnaires
during a mathematics lesson. Both questionnaires required students to respond on a
five-point scale ranging from ‘almost never’ to ‘almost always’. One questionnaire set
out to measure academic efficacy in mathematics and included seven items, such as: “I
can do almost all the maths class work if I don’t give up” and “Even if the maths is hard, I
can learn it.” The other questionnaire consisted of 60 questions intended to provide a
comprehensive assessment of the classroom environment.
This questionnaire was composed of 42 items on seven scales taken from the What Is
Happening In This Classroom? (WIHIC) instrument and 18 items on three scales derived
from The Constructivist Learning Environment Survey (CLES). The latter was included
to see whether constructivist environments had any specific effects on efficacy. The
table below explains the ten measures of classroom environment used for the study.
The researchers analysed student responses using a range of statistical methods in
order to discover any correlations between different aspects of classroom environment
and students’ academic efficacy. The results were analysed at the level of the year
group in order to minimise the impact of individual bias.
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What are the implications for head teachers and teachers?
In completing this digest, the authors began to ask the following questions about
implications for head teachers:




The researchers gave most emphasis to the results of analysis at the level of the
year group. What features do you analyse at whole school, year group, class and
individual levels? Would it be useful to examine whether different trends emerge
when results are analysed at different levels?
What tools and measures do you use to measure school climate and/or student
views on their ability to achieve their goals? Would any of the measures used to
conduct this research be of use to your school?
What whole-school strategies do you have in place to promote a positive school
climate and especially, to promote fairness and a focus on work?
How can you support staff to focus on measures which are likely to raise student
academic efficacy?
The digest authors also began to ask the following questions about implications for
teachers:

To what extent do you think your own classroom promotes the supportive ethos
described in the research? Would you want it to do so? What further aspects of
your practice would promote co-operation and student perceptions of fairness
and support?

The importance of student focus on the task is unsurprising, but the study noted
variation in student perception of how important it was for them to complete
activities and stay on task. How do you encourage students’ belief that it is
important to finish tasks and stay focused? Do any of your colleagues achieve
this in different ways? Is this something that would benefit from collective
reflection with colleagues?

Teachers who advocate a constructivist approach to teaching may find it helpful
to see the extent to which the open-endedness (and consequent uncertainties) of
their approach is balanced by more supportive (and more definite) measures in
other parts of their work.
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Where can I find out more?
Bandura, A. (1997) Self-efficacy: the exercise of control. New York: Freeman.
Dorman, J.P. (2002) Classroom environment research: progress and possibilities,
Queensland Journal of Educational Research, 18, 112-140.
Fraser, B. J. (1986) Classroom environment. London: Croom Helm.
Fraser, B. J. (1994) Research on classroom and school climate. In: D. L. Gabel (Ed.)
Handbook of research on science teaching. New York: Macmillan.
A four year study on teachers’ work lives and their effects on pupils:
www.nottingham.ac.uk/education/centres/crtsd/vitae/ (Newsletter 6 includes survey
results from pupils about their learning.)