Students' Individual Perceptions of School Climate Predict Reading Achievement in Shanghai

Abstract

Students, as one specific group of school stakeholders, have unique perceptions of school climate, which predict academic performance. In the Program for International Student Assessment 2009 Shanghai survey, 5,115 students from 152 schools participated. The results from this study showed that compared with their peers in the countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Shanghai students reported better teacher–student relationships, classroom disciplinary climate, and teacher stimulation of reading, although they had worse attitudes toward school. In line with prior literature, multilevel analyses in this study revealed that students' individual perceptions of school climate predicted reading achievement in Shanghai. Controlling for student background characteristics, these individual perceptions explained 1.71% of the within-school differences in reading achievement.

Keywords:

• Individual perception
• PISA
• reading achievement
• school climate
• Shanghai

Acknowledgements

Bo Ning is supported by a joint grant from the Chinese Scholarship Council, China and KU Leuven, Belgium (CSC-KUL Project 2010614006). The authors are grateful to their generous sponsorship. The authors are also indebted to Dr Garry Squires and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on earlier draft of this article.

Notes

^1. The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) uses imputation methods, denoting plausible values, to report student performance. Instead of directly estimating a student's ability θ, a probability distribution for a student's θ is estimated—that is, instead of obtaining a point estimate for θ, a range of possible values for a student's θ is estimated, with an associated probability for each of these values. Plausible values are random draws from this (estimated) distribution for a student's θ (Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development, 2009).

^2. It is worth mentioning that in the international student surveys, such as the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), the measures of students' perceptions need to be carefully constructed and interpreted, considering the possibility of response bias in the sense that differences in scores on the same attitudinal scale are caused by students' response styles across countries (Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development, 2010a). For instance, when Likert scales are used, respondents in some countries, such as China and Japan, are more likely to choose the midpoint, whereas students in some other countries, such as the United States, are more willing to select extreme responses (Kjærnsli & Lie, 2011).