Development of the School Climate Scale (SCS)

Abstract

School climate is an organizational feature which has effects on and affected by teachers, students, school principals and parents. In the scope of the school climate studies conducted in Turkey, school climate has been defined within the framework of the relations of school principals or teachers, and these studies have only asked for the opinions of school principals and teachers. However, students -the group most affected by the school climatehave been left out of the scope of these studies. Therefore, present study aimed at developing school climate scale focused on students. The scale was applied on a sample group of 482 students attending 6th, 7th and 8th grades of primary schools. The exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analyses were made to test structural and measurement validity of the scale. Analysis results proved that the scale is a three-dimensional scale with high goodness-of-fit values.