EVOLUTION AND VALIDATION OF A PERSONAL FORM OF AN INSTRUMENT FOR ASSESSING SCIENCE LABORATORY CLASSROOM ENVIRONMENTS

The research reported in this article makes two distinctive contributi ons to the field of classroom environment research. First, because exi sting instruments are unsuitable for science laboratory classes, the S cience Laboratory Environment Inventory (SLEI) was developed and valid ated. Second, a new Personal form of the SLEI (involving a student's p erceptions of his or her own role within the class) was developed and validated in conjunction with the conventional Class form (involving a student's perceptions of the class as a whole), and its usefulness wa s investigated. The instrument was cross-nationally fieldtested with 5 ,447 students in 269 senior high school and university classes in six countries, and cross-validated with 1,594 senior high school students in 92 classes in Australia. Each SLEI scale exhibited satisfactory int ernal consistency reliability, discriminant validity, and factorial va lidity, and differentiated between the perceptions of students in diff erent classes. A variety of applications with the new instrument furni shed evidence about its usefulness and revealed that science laborator y classes are dominated by closed-ended activities; mean scores obtain ed on the Class form were consistently somewhat more favorable than on the corresponding Personal form; females generally held more favorabl e perceptions than males, but these differences were somewhat larger f or the Personal form than the Class form; associations existed between attitudinal outcomes and laboratory environment dimensions; and the C lass and Personal forms of the SLEI each accounted for unique variance in student outcomes which was independent of that accounted for by th e other form.