Classroom climate in Serbia: The perspective of primary school teachers

Abstract

The goal of this research is to gain insight into the classroom climate in schools in Serbia from the perspective of teachers. To realize this goal, we set up two research questions: (1) How do teachers assess the importance of certain aspects of the classroom climate and their own engagement in creating favourable climate, and (2) which factors determine the quality of classroom climate. We considered four dimensions of classroom climate: equality in communication, social relationships between students, respect for students’ feelings and the organizing group work. The sample consisted of primary school teachers in Serbia (N=1441), who completed a questionnaire made for our research needs. The results of factor analysis confirmed the initial assumption that the selected dimensions are related in terms of their belonging to the same construct and sufficiently different to be considered as self-contained. The obtained results show that teachers in Serbia highly value the importance of all researched aspects of the classroom climate and believe that they are engaged to a large extent in creating a positive classroom climate. Also, it was shown that teachers’ gender and the teaching level are the most important determinants of classroom climate quality. Bearing in mind the limitations of the applied instrument it is concluded that the results should be considered with caution and that future research should include students’ perspective, direct class observation and qualitative methods to gain a more objective and more comprehensive understanding of the classroom climate.