Placing social and emotional support at the center of school climate: A scoping review of measures for middle and secondary schools

Abstract

School climate can be defined as the perceptions of students, teachers/staff, and families, and the patterns of experiences that guide their daily life at school. There are a multitude of largely consensual theoretical approaches that seek to define school climate, but similar constructs are often operationalized and measured with different designations. Additionally, there has been an increase in research, practice, and public policy on the social and emotional learning (SEL) of students, but the support for this domain is rarely explicitly reflected in school climate instruments. This scoping review aims to conduct an exhaustive search for existing school climate measures, and to (1) identify the ones most frequently used, and (2) critically assess the integration of support for social and emotional learning in their composition. Results reveal a proliferation of school climate measures, with 965 studies using 404 different instruments. An analysis of those used more than five times in the literature (n = 43) shows that approximately 5% of measures (less than 1% of all subscales) explicitly address SEL; two thirds include items operationalizing social and emotional skills in students (6% of all items); and 91% include subscales shown to be directly related to SEL in the literature (55.04% of all subscales). This study adds clarity to the conceptualization of school climate and its relationship with the support for students’ social and emotional learning, and its results contribute to increased monitoring of quality in school practices, placing students’ social and emotional development at the center.