How the socioecological characteristics of the classroom affect academic achievement

The aim of this study was to grasp and understand the social-psychological mechanisms by which the classroom socioecological environment determines academic achievement. We first developed and rested a general theoretical model (on a sample of 51 classrooms containing 1123 junior high school students) which allows us to consider the classroom social climate as a dependent and independent variable. We then attempted to accurately define the influence mechanism and develop a structural model to account for the relationships and interrelationships between variables. We also tried to reach two principal goals in the psychology of learning environments: one is to determine what classroom social environments would be advantageous to students, and the other is to identify the factors that determine that climate. The results indicated a climate-dependent discrepancy between teachers' grades and achievement test scores. They have some practical implications for optimizing the classroom social climate.