Measuring Sense of Community in Higher Education Learning Environments

The goal of this study is to establish the psychometric properties of a scale that captures sense of community in higher education that can be used with classes with course delivery ranging from 100% in-person to 100% virtual, and all classrooms in between. To achieve this goal, the principal investigators used three existing scales: brief sense of community scale ( Peterson et al., 2008 ), the classroom sense of community scale ( Petrillo et al., 2016 ), and the sense of virtual community scale ( Blanchard, 2007 ). These scales were closely examined, reworded to help promote alignment with principles of sense of community, following the four characteristics of this concept – membership, needs fulfillment, mutual influence, and shared emotional connection. Through this discussion, items were edited, dropped, or added to develop the new scale, which was then tested using a sample of college students from three different universities ( N = 295; 71.9% female). All scales demonstrated acceptable internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha and McDonald's omega ranged .94 to .95), and the newly created scale was correlated with three measures of sense of community in the classroom, validating this measure of community in higher education. Implications for higher education and recommendations for scale use are discussed.