Abstract
This paper developed a Democratic Classroom Survey to measure students’ perceived democratic environment of the classroom. Perceived democratic environment is one of the most important variables for understanding classroom activity and indeed any type of group activity, but actually measuring perceptions in an objective manner has been problematic. We developed the survey items from both a strong theoretical and a practical perspective, with the contention that Pleasing Authority/External Motivation, Performance Orientation, Cooperation/Collaboration, Integrated Activity, and Goals before Trust/Inter-subjective would be important factors for measuring individual students’ perceptions of the classroom along an authoritarian/democratic continuum. Factor analyses (Exploratory followed by Confirmatory analyses) confirmed the structure of the hypothesized subscales, and the good model fit indicated that the survey is valid. Also, correlation analyses with Classroom Community Scale showed good construct validity. Finally, reliability tests for each subscale and split-half reliability tests showed that the survey is a reliable tool to use in college classrooms. Implications and future directions are discussed.
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Hur, E.H., Glassman, M. & Kim, Y. Finding autonomy in activity: Development and validation of a democratic classroom survey. Educ Asse Eval Acc 25, 303–320 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11092-013-9173-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11092-013-9173-y