Toward the Construction of a School Environment Instrument: A Conceptual Framework
Keywords:
School environment, Educational administration, Measurement instrumentAbstract
Amid the growing complexities and turmoil that characterize the environment of the public school, it is curious that there have been few comprehensive efforts to assess systematically the impact of these changes on school operation. Based on current literature, this article proposes a two-dimensional matrix consisting, on the one hand, of factors extracted from macro-political, economic, social, and cultural domains having constraining effects on school operation and, on the other hand, of environmental attributes - change rate, complexity, organization, routineness (certainty), and directness - that conceivably describe those external factors identified. Although all relevant factors cannot be included, the model provides a basis for generating a 40-item instrument having a universal and dynamic orientation capable of constructing concrete graphic representation of sizes of external constraints on school for longitudinal and cross-cultural analysis.
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