Predictors of the Social Environment of Learning

Abstract

A series of studies of high school physics classes throughout the nation (summarized in Walberg and Anderson, 1968) has shown that measures of student perception of classroom environment obtained at midyear predict gains in cognitive, affective, and behavioral learning criteria during the school year. With an improved environment instrument, the first of a second series on a new sample (Walberg, 1969d) showed that the canonical functions of the scales predict the same battery of learning criteria. Further, the study showed that the functions account for significant and substantial variance even after initial differences in achievement and interest in the subject and IQ are entered in stepwise regression equations. There is also evidence that environment scales moderate the relationships of instruction (Walberg, 1969a), IQ (Anderson, 1968), and personality (Bar-Yam, 1969) to learning criteria. Since personality and intelligence are fairly resistant to sharp changes, especially in older children (Bloom, 1964), replicated studies of such moderating effects would make it possible to 1) assign students of different characteristics to optimal learning environments and 2) change environments to make them optimal for most students (Walberg, 1969a). The feasibility of the second alternative was shown by an experiment by Anderson, Walberg, and Welch (1969) in which it was found that different course materials randomly assigned to classes produced significant differences in classroom environments. To seek hypotheses for further experimentation

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 43 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.