Motivation, engagement, and social climate: An international study of boarding schools.

Abstract

Most educational climate research is conducted among (day school) students who spend the bulk of their young lives outside of school, potentially limiting the amount of climate variance that can be captured. Boarding school students, on the other hand, spend much of their lives at school and thus offer a potentially unique perspective on educational climate. The present study comprises an international sample (United States, Canada, United Kingdom, and Australia) of 3,274 high school students from 121 boarding houses nested under 21 schools. The study is a multilevel one that explores variance in boarding house motivation, engagement, and social climate at multiple levels of a nested educational structure: student, boarding house, and school. Once sociodemographic, prior achievement, personality, and boarding characteristics were entered as covariates, findings showed that on all climate measures there is greater variation from student-to-student than there is from house-to-house or school-to-school. Interestingly, house climate ratings tended to vary more from school-to-school, than from house-to-house. Of the covariates, gender, personality, and time spent in boarding school predicted numerous motivation, engagement, and social climate factors. Overall, findings suggest that boarding house climate is very much in the eye of the individual boarder. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)