ABSTRACT
Lay persons and educational professionals have implicitly and explicitly accepted the idea that different school environments have unique characteristics and that these characteristics have particular effects on the people in these environments. This is apparent when we speak of moving an easily distractible student to a more structured class, employing an aggressive teacher for a position in a “rough” school, or enrolling our creative preschooler into an open-classroom program. This idea is intuitively and scientifically compelling, yet exceedingly difficult to assess. Researchers have become interested in measuring various aspects of the physical setting (Myrick and Marx 1968; Getzels 1974), the organizational dimensions such as the school size or the faculty/student ratio (Astin 1977; Pace 1969), student and personnel demographics (Alwin and Otto 1977), and social climate (Brookover, Schweitzer, Schneider, Beady, Flood, and Wisenbaker 1978). This study focuses on the measurement of the last of these aspects.
