Abstract
AimA beneficial classroom climate is vital for school achievements, health, well-being, and school satisfaction. However, there is little knowledge as to how the classmate characteristics and class composition are related to the level of a perceived messy and disorderly classroom climate and whether the estimated relationships vary between different groups of children. The aim of the study was to explore the relationship between classmate characteristics as well as class composition and children’s perceived classroom climate.MethodData from a cross-sectional survey administrated in 71 classes including 1,247 children in a mid-sized Swedish city were used. The analyses were conducted using multilevel models.ResultsA class with a higher proportion of girls was associated with a lower likelihood of perceiving the classroom climate as messy and disorderly. Moreover, a higher proportion of immigrant children in a class was associated with a perception of a messier and disorderly classroom climate among non-immigrant children, but not among immigrant children themselves.ConclusionClassmate characteristics and class composition deserve more research attention and can be important considerations when aiming to improve the classroom climate and children’s well-being in general.
Highlights
The classroom is where children spend most of their time, and a beneficial classroom climate is of substantial importance in establishing a supportive and healthy school environment (WHO 1991; Persson and Haraldsson 2013)
For the proportion of girls, we instead created two different dummy variables, a high female proportion and low female proportion, since our analyses showed that models treating the proportion of girls as non-linear were preferred compared to models treating the proportion of girls in a linear fashion, i.e., with regard to the statistical fit
The estimates of the intraclass correlation (ICC), which is a measure of the correlatedness within classes, are 0.27, 0.24, and 0.25, respectively
Summary
The classroom is where children spend most of their time, and a beneficial classroom climate is of substantial importance in establishing a supportive and healthy school environment (WHO 1991; Persson and Haraldsson 2013). It has been shown that an important aspect of the classroom climate is children’s own perception of it (Gillen et al 2011; Hagquist 2012; Veerman 2015). It is, difficult to identify a universally agreed-upon definition of what is meant by Bclassroom climate^ in the literature or to what a perception of a messy and disorderly classroom refers (Duun and Harris 1998; Gillen et al 2011). A poorer classroom climate is seen as a serious threat to the learning environment (Veerman 2015), children’s school achievements, health, well-being (Holen et al 2012), and school satisfaction (Persson et al 2016). A beneficial classroom climate is increasingly recognized in the policy world
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