A longitudinal study of school climate: Reciprocal effects with student engagement and burnout

The literature on school climate, albeit vast, is limited by a scarcity of longitudinal research. This two-wave longitudinal study aims to bridge this gap by (a) assessing, over two school years, the changes in students' perceptions of several dimensions of school climate and (b) exploring the reciprocal longitudinal effects of student perceptions of school climate and multiple dimensions of engagement and burnout. The study was conducted with a sample of 243 Italian middle school students (Wave 1: sixth grade, M-age = 11.68; Wave 2: seventh grade, M-age = 12.64; 51.7% girls). Analyses of variance showed, in the second school year, a decrease in students' satisfaction with various school climate dimensions. With a latent cross-lagged model, better school climate perceptions were found to predict higher emotional engagement and lower symptoms of burned-out exhaustion a year later. The practical implications of these findings are considered in the discussion and conclusion.