DEVELOPMENT OF SHORT FORMS OF SEVERAL CLASSROOM ENVIRONMENT SCALES

Classroom learning environment has been firmly established as the subject of a thriving area of study through the recent publication of key books (Moos, 1979; Walberg, 1979) and reviews (Fraser, 1981 a; Fraser & Walberg, 1981). The strongest tradition in past research has involved use of student perceptions as independent variables in studies of the predictability of students' cognitive and affective outcomes from their classroom environment perceptions. In fact, a recent meta-analysis has provided consistent and substantial support for the incremental predictive validity of student perceptions in accounting for appreciable variance in learning outcomes, which is often beyond that attributable to IQ and pretest performance (Haertel, Walberg & Haertel, 1981). Other studies reviewed in Fraser (1981 b) have employed classroom environment perceptions as dependent variables in investigating factors (e.g., class size, grade level) which affect the nature of the classroom environment. In particular, classroom environment variables have differentiated revealingly between alternative curricula when various cognitive outcome measures have shown little sensitivity. Some classroom environment instruments can be used not only to assess actual environment, but also to measure preferred environment. The preferred forms are concerned with goals and value orientations as they measure perceptions of the environment ideally liked or preferred. Although item wording is identical in actual and preferred forms, there are somewhat different instructions for answering. Having these different forms permits investigation of differences between students and teachers in their perceptions of actual and preferred classroom environment. One such study recently showed that both students and teachers preferred a more favorable classroom environment than they perceived as being actually present, and that teachers tended to perceive the actual classroom environment more favorably than did their students in the same classrooms (Fraser, in press). Another use of actual and preferred forms is in person-environment fit studies of whether students achieve more in their preferred environment. Fraser and Rentoul's (1980) research has shown that student cognitive achievement was related to the congruence between the actual classroom environment and that preferred by students. A useful practical application involves teachers in using assessments of student perceptions of actual and preferred environment to guide systematic attempts at improving classrooms (Fraser, 1981c). Although the original long forms of various classroom environment instruments have been used successfully for many purposes, some researchers and many teachers have expressed a preference for more economical and simple methods of assessing classroom environment. One common way to achieve this in studies involving class mean environment perceptions is to use a system of matrix sampling in which different random fractions of the students within each class respond simultaneously to different scales in a battery. While the use of matrix sampling economizes on student testing time and