An Instrument for Measuring Classroom and School Community
The comparative analysis of distance education with face-to-face classes, according to some experts, should consider factors such as differences in school environments, differences in student characteristics, and differences in instructor skills (for designing and teaching courses). Three researchers (Rovai, Wighting, & Lucking) appear to have made progress in research on the first factor mentioned above, the analysis of school environments at the postsecondary level. Their literature review indicated the lack of a survey instrument that could obtain student responses for measurement of school environment so they proceeded to develop a scale of twenty items. They dubbed this new instrument the Classroom and School Community Inventory (CSCI).
Rovai, Wighting & Lucking explain that their scale captures two distinct dimensions of the "sense of community construct." These dimensions are the social community and the learning community for an environment. Their scale also purportedly recognizes the "conceptual distinction between sense of community in classroom and school learning environments" by forming two subscales that they label as the "classroom form" and the "school form," respectively. In their instrument testing, the trio found that the CSCI is "able to discriminate between traditional and online university students, with traditional students showing as expected a stronger sense of school community."
The trio took the following steps, among others, in this project:
- Used the Classroom Community Scale and the Dean Alienation Scale [two pre-existing instruments] to evaluate the validity of the CSCI.
- Used expert judges to screen their initial set of items.
- Did confirmatory factor analysis with a sample of 341 online and face-to-face students to "confirm the factor structures of both instruments [the classroom form and the school form] and to ensure items loaded unambiguously on either the classroom or school scales..." [p.270]
- Measured item reliability with Cronbach's alpha.
- Tested instrument stability [test-retest reliability] by "pretest and posttest measurements with a 2-week interval between measurements..." [p.270]
They conclude "sufficient evidence exists to use the CSCI in educational research. Several criteria of validity were used and tell a relatively consistent story suggesting face, content, concurrent, and construct validity of CSCI scores." [p.277] Given the above, this work has relevance to analysts of distance education because they now have a tool to evaluate possible interventions that were designed to improve the sense of community among students in a given distance education program (or any face-to-face environment as well).
Alfred P. Rovai (Regent University in Virginia Beach, Virginia), Mervyn J. Wighting (Regent University) and Robert Lucking (Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia) document their work in an article ("The Classroom and School Community Inventory: Development, Refinement, and Validation of a Self-Report Measure for Educational Research") in the journal Internet and Higher Education (Vol.7, 2004, pp. 263-280). The article includes the actual twenty items in the two forms that make up the CSCI, the test populations of students, more than 40 references, and a concise review of recent research on the topic.
[Abstract done by Willard Hom, Director, Research & Planning Unit, System Office, California Community Colleges, 2/21/05]
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