Session 4: Assessing the Learning Environment II

The school learning environment can be broadly categorised by school, teacher and student dimensions. By these dimensions, we mean --
School: Leadership, school vision and strategic thrusts, school culture, discipline, security and other physical aspects of the environment.
Teachers: Teaching methodology, nurture, beliefs and the ability to bring out the best in every child.
Students: Interactions and relationships with teachers and fellow schoolmates, learning style, attitude and socioemotional learning.

Quantitative measurement of the school learning environment can be measured using the SLEQ (School Level Environment Questionnaire). The dimensions of the questionnaire follow Moo's schema of Relationship, Personal Development and System Maintenance and Change. These dimensions include: Student support, affiliation (in terms of bonding and identity), professional interest, achievement orientation, staff freedom (in terms of personal growth), involvement in participatory decision making, innovation, resource adequacy and work pressure. The questions follow a cyclical format for each dimension (eg. student support follows questions 1, 10, 19, 28) in a scale of 4 to 6 questions. This is to minimise inaccurate answering on the part of survey participants. The responses are graded on a 4-point Likert Scale.

The groups then came together to discuss 3 different case studies of secondary schools in Singapore. The case studies were very authentic and gave perspectives of different learning environments in each school.

Later in the day, we learnt about the use of SPSS software to analyse results obtained from the WIHIC questionnaire by doing the Cronbach alpha reliability test. After compiling the raw data on Excel, we copied the numerical data onto SPSS, leaving out the headings. Edit the headings in the variables view.

Sequence:
1) Click on Analyse
2) Go to Scale
3) Choose Reliability Analysis
4) To calculate value for student cohesiveness, highlight Pref1Sc--7Sc and move them over to the right column
5) Choose statistics
6) Choose Item, Scale......leaving Tukey's test and Intraclass coefficient unchecked.
7) Generate results.
8) Save results (filename.spo)
9) Change the filename to .html or .ppt format so that the file can be viewed without using the SPSS software.

In the analysis of the results, refer to Reliability Statistics, Summary Item Statistics and Scale Statistics.

Dr Quek also introduced us to this useful website on online learning:
eduweb.nie.edu.sg/onlinelearning

New terms that we came across:
*Cronbach Alpha Reliability http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cronbach's_alpha
* Paired-sample t-test http://www.une.edu.au/WebStat/unit_materials/c6_common_statistical_tests/paired_sample_t.html