Studying classroom climate effects in the context of multi-level structural equation modelling: an application-focused theoretical discussion and empirical demonstration

Abstract

The present article focuses on classroom climate effects in the context of multi-level structural equation modelling. We first discuss the need to appropriately model classroom climate as a classroom-level construct. We then analyse the effects of classroom climate (academic goal structures and social goal structures) on students' motivation in terms of achievement goals (mastery goals) in an empirical demonstration. This study relies on doubly latent multi-level structural equation modelling and draws on a sample of 1,645 Austrian secondary school students (52.8% girls, mean age = 14.32 years, SD = 1.42) from 83 mathematics classes. In addition, we address the question of whether and to what extent the results and interpretation differ if single-level analyses that solely account for the nested data structure by correcting standard errors are employed. Comparing the multi-level structural equation modelling results to the single-level results underlines the necessity of adequately disentangling effects at different levels. Our work is intended to raise awareness of how methodological choices affect substantive interpretations in classroom climate research, and to inform and provide guidance to (applied) researchers interested in studying the effects of classroom climate using multi-level structural equation modelling.

How teacher and classmate support relate to students’ stress and academic achievement

“…Educational systems such as schools are multilevel systems ( Kozlowski and Klein, 2000 ) in which students are grouped into classes and share similar experiences. At the class level, perceived peer and teacher support constitute the class climate, which, when analyzed, must be treated as a class-level construct ( Lüdtke et al, 2009 ; Bardach et al, 2020 ). The classroom climate is a common characteristic that all students in a class are exposed to.…”

The role of the learning environment in adolescents’ motivational development

“…Furthermore, features of the educational context (i.e., adaptive prerequisites) are usually captured by aggregated classroom and school variables (Lüdtke et al, 2008;Marsh et al, 2012;Bardach et al, 2020). For example , Morin et al (2014) demonstrated that aggregated classroom climate (i.e., classroom goals, challenge, teacher caring) had positive effects on students' self-efficacy.…”

Implizite Fähigkeitstheorien, akademisches Selbstkonzept und schulisches Wohlbefinden

“…Zusätzlich wurde für Leistung (latenter Faktor aus den letzten Zeugnisnoten in den Hauptfächern Deutsch, Mathematik, Englisch) bei akademischem Selbstkonzept und schulischem Wohlbefinden kontrolliert. In allen Analysen wurde die hierarchische Datenstruktur (Schüler*innen genestet in Klassen) mit Hilfe von clusterrobusten Standardfehlern berücksichtigt (Bardach et al 2020).…”