Learning environments

The School Belongingness Scale (SBS) is a 10-item measure of students' sense of belonging in the school as a whole as well as their relationships with teachers and peers. The measure includes items related to "Social Exclusion" and "Social Acceptance."

The Social Connectedness Scale includes 8 items and measures students' sense of connectedness, affiliation, and companionship to provide a broad picture of belongingness. The authors have an accompanying Social Assurance scale (which measures students' sense of companionship and affiliation) often administered in tandem with the Social Connectedness Scale.

The SSP, available in both English and Spanish, is an online survey questionnaire with 195 multiple-choice items. These items address students’ beliefs about their social environment—neighborhoods, schools, friends, and families—and about their own physical and psychological health and school performance (individual adaptation). The survey is divided into six modules: About You (6 items), Neighborhood (26 items), School (54 items), Friends (25 items), Family (45 items), and Health and Well-Being (39 items).

The Sense of Social Fit Scale is a 17-item measure that assesses how much a person feels they belong in a group, such as a school, club, or academic department.

The Identification with School Questionnaire includes 16 Likert-scale items assessing students' identification with or disidentification from school.

The full 78-item Hemingway includes 15 ecological subscales measuring three domains of adolescent connectedness - connectedness to self, connectedness to others, and connectedness to society. 

The Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale (ECERS) is an assessment of classroom quality measuring environmental provisions and teacher-child interactions affecting the developmental needs of preschool- and kindergarten-aged children. The third edition of the assessment, ECERS-3, includes 35 items focusing on the following six domains: space and furnishings, personal care routines, language and literacy, learning activities, interaction, and program structure. ECERS may be used to evaluate inclusive and culturally diverse educational settings. 

The Scale for Teachers’ Assessment of Routines Engagement (STARE) documents teachers’ perspectives of a child’s engagement in classroom activities. Suitable for both typically developing children and children with disabilities, STARE focuses on how much time the child was engaged with adults, peers, and materials (toys, art supplies, environment in general). In addition, STARE explores how complex the engagement was. STARE is completed after a specific classroom activity and takes about 20 seconds. The STARE can be completed as frequently as necessary. 

The Quality of Classroom Instruction (QCI) measures the quality of explicit instruction. QCI examines the following eight aspects of instructional interactions: teacher modeling, instructional pacing, response time, transitions between activities, student engagement, learning success, checks of student understanding, and academic feedback. Observers assign QCI scores to each instructional aspect on a scale from 1 (low quality) to 3 (high quality) at the end of the observed lesson.

The Pride Learning Environment Survey is a comprehensive school climate survey designed for students in grades 6 to 12. This assessment measures aspects ranging from student-teacher relationships to student mental health and teacher involvement alone with several additional concepts. The Pride Learning Environment Survey can be administered in conjunction with the Pride Teaching Environment survey in order to to directly compare teacher and student responses.

The Culturally Responsive Instruction Observation Protocol (CRIOP) is a comprehensive framework and evaluation tool that operationalizes culturally responsive instruction. Indicators of culturally responsive instruction are rated on a scale of 0 (never) to 4 (consistently); and each indicators includes detailed examples of what constitutes responsive and non-responsive practice. The CRIOP is intended for use as a classroom observation guide for coaches, principals, instructional coaches, etc. to support classroom teachers in the development of more culturally responsive instruction.

The Mathematical Quality of Instruction (MQI) is a Common Core-aligned observational rubric that provides a framework for analyzing mathematics instruction. Observers rate instruction across five domains: common core-aligned student practices; working with students and mathematics; richness of mathematics; errors and imprecision; and, classroom work is connected to mathematics. Although originally designed for research use, the MQI can be used as a tool to support teachers' professional development.

The Multicultural Teaching Observation Instrument (MTOI) is a tool used to assess the types of multicultural teaching that takes places in the classroom setting. The MTOI is comprised of 18 items grouped into 3 categories, Teacher Support of Students, Classroom Equity, and Integration of Students' Culture. The Teacher Support category measures a teachers' support of students as individuals and their culture. The Classroom equity category measures whether teachers are fair or equitable toward all students and the extent to which teachers try to reduce prejudice in the classroom. The integration of students' culture category examines examines the extent to which resources, materials, and practices that reflect multicultural teaching are used in the classroom. This category measures how well multicultural concepts are integrated into the classroom and the curriculum.

The Assessing School Settings: Interactions of Students and Teachers observational measure (ASSIST) is a classroom observation instrument that rates social processes occurring in the classroom. The instrument was initially developed to evaluate students' and teachers' behaviors using the Positive Behavior Intervention and Support (PBIS), however, recent updates have primarily focused on teachers. Teachers' behaviors are rated through event‐based tallies and global ratings. The measure has been used to evaluate the effects of school-wide interventions, and the relationship between teacher and student behaviors.

The Instructional Climate Survey-Student version (ICS-S) is a 20-item measure of students' perceptions of school climate created in 1988 in response to an increased focus on school climate as a causative factor in students dropping out of school. Each item is answered on a five-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (strong disagree) to 5 (strongly agree).

The Belonging Uncertainty Scale is an assessment of an individual's worry that they do not fit into a certain group or setting. The 3 question items that constitute this scale are scored on a seven-point Likert scale.

This 22-item questionnaire is designed to assess children's perceptions of their ability to enact prosocial verbal persuasive skills in specific peer situations. 12 scale items describe conflict situations, and 10 items describe non-conflict situations. Students are asked to respond to each situation on a four-point Likert scale.

Subscales within the article are: Critical Awareness, Heritage Language Expectations, Cultural Content Integration. The authors reported that honoring students’ heritage language (i.e., Spanish) is the mediating element through which cultural content integration predicts mathematics achievement for Latino children. 

Culturally Ambitious Teaching Practices in Mathematics (CATP) measures practices that support the development of a culturally relevant classroom environment.

The Classroom Practices Inventory is a classroom observation measure for early childhood classrooms. It is designed to assess the developmental appropriateness of classroom and curricular practices, teachers actions, children's activities, and teacher-child interactions.

The Child Caregiver Interaction Scale (CCIS), Revised Edition is an observation-based instrument created by Dr. Barbara Carl, Ph.D that assesses caregiver-child interaction. The 14 items are based upon the Developmentally Appropriate Practice position statements of the National Association for the Education of Young Children’s (NAEYC) and the National Health and Safety Performance Standards. The CCIS, which measures emotional, cognitive/physical, and social behaviors, is appropriate for children from birth to 5 years.

COEMET is a classroom observation instrument that evaluates classroom culture and the use of specific math activities. It includes questions about how actively the teacher interacts with the children, how the teacher uses teachable math moments, how math is displayed in the physical environment of the room, how confident the teacher appears about math, etc. The specific math activities measured are not connected to a specific curriculum.

The Early Childhood Classroom Observation Measure (ECCOM) is a classroom observation instrument that rates the nature and quality of academic instruction and the overall learning environment. The instrument is based on social-constructivist learning theory, such that in high-scoring classrooms teachers are identified as actively guiding and supporting children's learning efforts and the development of their social skills.

The Early Language & Literacy Classroom Observation Toolkit (ELLCO) is a classroom observation measure that assesses the quality of the classroom environment and teacher practices across five key elements: classroom structure, curriculum, the language environment, books and book reading opportunities, and print and early writing support. The measure is primarily designed for administrators and teachers of preschool and early elementary classrooms to use for professional development and program improvement.

The Frequency of Mathematics Instructional Practices Survey is a 14-item survey of self-reported instructional practices. The survey can be used by teachers, administrators, teacher educators, policymakers and researchers in order to assess the extent to which teachers' practices are social-constructivist or transmission-based.

Framework for Teaching is a classroom observation instrument that can be used for measuring and evaluating the instructional quality of all teachers (from pre-service to experienced) across K-12. The measure can be flexibly used by classroom teachers for professional learning, school leaders for evaluation, researchers for measurement, and system leaders as a common language for organizing the profession.

The Geometry Assessments for Secondary Teachers (GAST) Classroom Observation Tool classifies the teaching moves and instructional tasks of teachers according to cognitive demand. It is designed for use specifically within math lessons focused on similarity, congruence, surface area, and volume. It can be used by teacher educators and researchers to identify the quality of math instruction within this domain.

The Protocol for Language Arts Teaching Observations (PLATO) is a classroom observation protocol designed to evaluate thirteen elements of English Language Arts (ELA) instruction. It was originally developed for a study of the relationship between teachers' classroom practices and their impact on student achievement. It is currently being used as a professional development tool to support teachers' use of rigorous, research-based teaching practices. PLATO is designed to work across a variety of curricula and instructional approaches.