Advance in Classroom Climate Measurement Methods

Classroom climate refers to the predominant and stable psychological states in a classroom, including attentional state, emotional state and so on. Low inference measures were mainly used to measure classroom climate, and now the dominating methods are high inference measures, which measure subjective experience of teachers and students from their perception. However, the high inference measurement methods lack objectivity, dynamic nature, practicality and operability and it is difficult to take account of individual difference meanwhile and study the interaction of the factors that affect classroom climate and the internal mechanism of dynamically changeable climate. The agent-based modeling can make up for the deficiency, which could be used to model agents' activities, probe into the interaction of subjects and objects and monitor the dynamically change of the system. This helps explore a new way to measure the classroom climate. During the period of primary school, middle school and even university, students spend most of the time in the classroom. Positive classroom climate not only improves students' performance and interpersonal relationship, but also enhances their psychological health. The curriculum reform in china explicitly required the teachers to create a positive classroom climate that is beneficial to the students' integrated development. Therefore, the number of the classroom climate research has soared since 1990. If "classroom environment" and "classroom climate" are indexed in the CNKI(Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure), 265,485 and 421,104 papers respectively can be searched; the number has increased every year since 2003 and since the beginning of 2013, there has been 16,170 papers published in China. However, literatures of classroom climate in china are mostly theoretical and speculative, and the measurement methods used in the few empirical studies are similar to those used in the foreign research, most of which are quantitative research. Now, the curriculum reform is promoted so fast that it poses new challenges to the measurement method of classroom climate, so it is essential to review the previous literature, summarize the advantages of the studies and propose new measurement methods, for instance, agent-based modeling, a method of the emerging complex science, which can cover the shortage, keep pace of the technological innovation and provide some operable strategies for creating favorable classroom climate.