Predicting student views of the classroom: a Californian perspective

In this study, it was determined which factors influenced students' perceptions of their learning environment. Students' perceptions were measured with the What Is Happening In this Class questionnaire (WIHIC). Data were analysed for a large sample of US (California) middle school classes. Several variables were included in the study, such as student and teacher gender, student ethnic background and socio-economic background (SES), student age, but also class and school variables, such as class ethnic composition, class size and school SES. Hierarchical analyses of variance (multilevel analyses) were conducted to investigate separate and joint effects of these variables. In the presentation, we will report on effect sizes of these variables and on the amounts of variance they explained. Results indicate that some scales of the WIHIC are more inclined to measure personal, idiosyncratic features of students' perceptions of their learning environments, whereas other scales contain more variance at the class level. Also, different variables affect different scale scores. A variable that consistently affected students' perceptions, regardless of the element of interest in the learning environment was student gender. On average, girls perceived their learning environment as more positive than did boys