A Psychometric Evaluation of a Revised School Climate Teacher Survey

The concept of school climate has been an important topic for education and it has been studied extensively over the past several decades. One of the challenges in such a research effort is to develop instruments that effectively and efficiently measure the construct. Literature has documented a number of school climate instruments, most of which target students' perceptions. A review of recent literature on school climate suggests that it is imperative to assess teachers' perceptions of school climate. The purpose of this study was to examine the factor structure and reliability of a revised version of a teacher survey instrument designed to measure school climate. Based on the data from a comprehensive character education project implemented in an urban school district in 2007 (n = 380), 2008 (n = 305), and 2010 (n = 277), results of exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis revealed a seven-factor structure across 3 years, indicating a stable factor structure of the revised form. The scales in this abbreviated form demonstrated similar reliability to those of the original form.