A Smarter School Climate Measurement, Where Every Voice Counts

School administrators track a wide range of metrics to gauge how well their learning environments serve students. School climate is one of the most consequential and among the most complex to capture. It is the atmosphere where learning, friendships, and engagement happen.

Research consistently shows that school climate is a meaningful predictor of students' emotional, behavioral, and academic outcomes. Measuring school climate often and tracking it over time are important early steps to help all students thrive.

Yet, a recent review of school climate measures available to schools finds that many lack accessibility, academic rigor, relevance, and utility. Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence’s School Climate Walkthrough, a secondary school climate survey for students, is attracting scholarly attention for its unique process and features, which aim to start a new chapter of climate assessment focused on combining student voice with strong research backing.

Schools have access to a range of school climate measurement options. Most ask some version of the same questions:

• Do students feel safe?

• Do students feel connected?

• Do students feel like they belong?

These are important questions that offer a school community a window into the student experience. But many available measures have not been tested enough to make sure students interpret and answer questions the same way, a quality called measurement invariance. In other words, when student A says they feel safe in school, is their definition of “safe” the same for a student of a different identity?

A school can show high average scores but hide big differences in how groups of students feel.

Finding these differences with detailed data is important, and more people are noticing this. However, this analysis should only be done after the measure has shown invariance.

These gaps may be more important than overall scores, but first the measure must prove it is a valid and consistent way to assess school climate, and that the differences are real and not just errors in the method.

Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence’s School Climate Walkthrough is one of the few tools with this evidence. Two of its co-developers, Jennifer Seibyl and Aakash Chowkase, presented it at this year’s Society for Research in Adolescence Conference and the American Educational Research Association conference. The tool was also recently named a finalist out of 300+ submissions in a national tools competition.

To create a tool that measures school climate well for all students, the first step is to involve students in the development process. Lead researcher, Jessica Hoffmann, emphasizes a core value of her lab: “We do research with people, not on people.” As such, the School Climate Walkthrough tool did not start in a research lab, it started in schools. Researchers traveled across the country and asked young people to describe what it meant to be part of a positive school climate. Across public and private schools, urban and suburban, students spoke about their criteria for a good school—a leader who knew all their names and asked about their weekend, nutritious food in the cafeteria, and teachers who seemed excited to teach. Their insights are embedded into the tool.

When schools use the School Climate Walkthrough tool, students and adults receive a personalized report and have access to a debriefing session with Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence research team. The survey takes approximately 20 minutes for students to complete, is administered on a single day, and provides an instant snapshot of how students perceive their school.