Thursday, December 4, 2008
Assessing the Quality of learning Environments in Swedish schools: development and analysis of a theory-based instrument By Mara Westling Allodi
The author notes that the practice of using validated and theory-based instruments is still not well-established in Swedish schools. With this in mind, the first aim of the reserach was to illustrate, from the students' perspectives, the development of a theory-based instrument for assessing goals, values and attitudes as perceived in educational settings. The second aim was to analyse the results of a questionnaire to tset how the data fitted the hypothesised model and other alternative models.
The need to create a new questionnaire suited to the learning environment in Sweden was to address the general resistance in Swedish schools to undertaking quantitative measurements of group processes and interactions, and also the mindset that these cannot be measured with international instruments applicable everywhere.
The article examines in some detail Schwatz's general theory of values which is used together with Moos's general model and 3 dimensions.Schwatz's model describes universal values which depend on human needs for group intercation and social needs for coordination. Cross-cultural comparisons have shown that, despite cultural differences across countries and populations, the essential structure and the internal relations among the values are quite stable (Schwatz and Sagiv 1995). Looking at the two figures, you can see that Schwatrz's model shows values as a multi-faceted construct with two bi-polar value dimensions. The combination of these dimensions are used to identify universal value types (see table 1). the value types are structured in a continuum in the bipolar model (see Fig 1). This model suggest what value types are supposed to be essential in a theory of human values.
SPSS was used to calculate the overall means and reliability coefficients for the scales.
The Goals, Attitudes and Values in School (GAVIS) questionnaire was thus developed on the basis of these theoretical frameworks concerning learning environments, universal human values and studies of students' experience of learning environments. It can be used by teachers and special educators to assess the quality of their classroom learning environments, as perceived by their students, and to identify strengths and weaknesses in their classroom climate. The profiles obtained for each classroom with the mean scores from each scale could help the teacher plan interventions specific to the individual class profiles.