Effects of Classroom Social Climate on Individual Learning

Teachers often suggest that classes have a distinctive personality or which influences the learning efficiency of their members. In some classes, the difficulties of one pupil become the concern of all. In other groups, each child works for personal rewards and the presence of others does little to aid or frustrate his individual learning. The properties of school classes that account for some of these differences have been termed the classroom social climate (Anderson, 1968). Derived from prior group research and from an intuitive analysis of the types of interactions that are present in typical school classes, these climate properties include interpersonal relationships among pupils, relationships between pupils and their teacher, relationships between pupils and both the subject studied and the method of learning, and finally, pupils' perceptions of the structural characteristics of the class. Previous research on classroom social climate has provided some insights into two aspects of the social psychology of the school class group. One study (Walberg and Anderson, 1968) considered the relationships between individual pupil perceptions of their class and their individual learning; a subsequent study (Anderson & Walberg, 1968) attempted to account for differential class performance in terms of