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Profiles of Adolescents’ Perceptions of Democratic Classroom Climate and Students’ Influence: The Effect of School and Community Contexts

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Abstract

Students’ learning experiences and outcomes are shaped by school and classroom contexts. Many studies have shown how an open, democratic classroom climate relates to learning in the citizenship domain and helps nurture active and engaged citizens. However, little research has been undertaken to look at how such a favorable classroom climate may work together with broader school factors. The current study examines data from 14,292 Nordic eighth graders (51% female) who had participated in the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study in 2009, as well as contextual data from 5,657 teachers and 618 principals. Latent class analysis identifies profiles of students’ perceptions of school context, which are further examined with respect to the contextual correlates at the school level using two-level fixed effects multinomial regression analyses. Five distinct student profiles are identified and labeled “alienated”, “indifferent”, “activist”, “debater”, and “communitarian”. Compared to indifferent students, debaters and activists appear more frequently at schools with relatively few social problems; being in the communitarian group is associated with aspects of the wider community. Furthermore, being in one of these three groups (and not in the indifferent group) is more likely when teachers act as role models by engaging in school governance. The results are discussed within the framework of ecological assets and developmental niches for emergent participatory citizenship. The implications are that adults at school could enhance multiple contexts that shape adolescents’ developmental niches to nurture active and informed citizens for democracies.

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Notes

  1. Note that data about ethnic group membership was collected as a national option and categories varied across countries, limiting the analysis possible with the CivEd and ICCS datasets.

  2. Following the tradition of other large-scale assessments of the IEA, the items that assessed students’ civic knowledge have not been made available to those conducting secondary analysis.

  3. Although information about students’ immigration status was collected (see first note), these data were reserved for future analysis.

  4. Had we chosen six latent classes, one of these five latent classes would have split into two latent classes (one of them of extremely small size). Furthermore, the fit indices of separate LCA on each aspect of the school climate supported three- to six-class models. Their triangulation suggested five latent classes as the optimal solution, which reflects the student profiles very well. More complex latent class models performed worse than the models reported here.

  5. “Teachers present several sides of the issues […].” and “All schools should have a <school parliament>”.

  6. All results were compared to analyses in which cases with missing data were eliminated, yielding only one significant difference: Had cases been eliminated from the analyses, we would have identified a significant negative effect of the student-teacher ratio on being in the Alienated group (p < .05).

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Nora Elise Hesby Mathé, Thomas Ringenberg, the journal editor and three anonymous reviewers for their feedback on earlier versions of this article. Furthermore, we would also like to acknowledge the valuable feedback received from the audience that attended a seminar organized by Kerry J. Kennedy and held by the first author at the Centre for Governance and Citizenship at the Education University of Hong Kong on 27 June 2017.

Authors’ Contributions

F.R. conceived of the analysis and its design, performed the statistical analysis, and drafted the manuscript. J.C. participated in the design of the analysis and in the interpretation of the data and helped to draft the manuscript. J.T.P. participated in the interpretation of the data and helped to draft the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Funding

This project was supported by a grant of the Faculty Research Fund awarded by the Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, and by a Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship awarded by the National Academy of Education, Washington, DC, USA with generous support from the Spencer Foundation.

Data Sharing Declaration

The data analyzed here are available from the IEA Study Data Repository (http://rms.iea-dpc.org/).

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Correspondence to Frank Reichert.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. This article does not contain any studies with animals. The data used in this study were collected by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) and all data collection procedures conformed with the rigorous methodological and ethical standards of the IEA, including informed consent, confidentiality and anonymity, and voluntary participation.

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Reichert, F., Chen, J. & Torney-Purta, J. Profiles of Adolescents’ Perceptions of Democratic Classroom Climate and Students’ Influence: The Effect of School and Community Contexts. J Youth Adolescence 47, 1279–1298 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-018-0831-8

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