Differences in the Psychosocial Work Environment of Different Types of Schools.

Past work on psychosocial environments can be divided usefully into research involving students' perceptions of their classroom-level environment and studies of teachers' perceptions of their school-level environment. Of several instruments for assessing the school learning environment, Moos's Work Environment Scale (WES) is unique in its focus on the school as a work setting and it has considerable potential for use with teachers despite the fact that it was designed initially for any work milieu. Its 10 dimensions of Involvement, Peer Cohesion, Staff Support, Autonomy, Task Orientation, Work Pressure, Clarity, Control, Innovation and Physical Comfort seem quite well-suited to describing salient features of the school teacher's work environment. Administration of a slightly reworded version of the WES to a large sample of teachers responding to both an actual form (N=599) and a preferred form (N=543) attested to the internal consistence reliability and discriminant validity of both forms with either the individual teacher or the school mean as the unit of analysis. Each scale in the actual form differentiated significantly between the perceptions of teachers in different schools. A comparison of the climates of four types of government schools(Australian) revealed that elementary schools had more favorable school environments than high schools, district schools and secondary colleges on nearly all of the WES's 10 dimensions. In particular, elementary schools were most distinctive in terms of their greater innovation and physical comfort and their reduced work pressure relative to other school types. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]