Not like the weather: classroom climates as group-level subjective phenomena, classroom microclimates as individual differences
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A central proposition of motivational climate theory is that psychological climates are not like weather patterns—they're in the minds of groups and individuals. Drawing on evidence from achievement motivation research, we will elaborate on psychological climate as a subjective phenomenon. We also describe implications of this phenomenon for how researchers study classrooms and how to make them more psychologically supportive for students' learning, motivation, and wellbeing. In particular, studying classroom processes that effectively support students requires that researchers distinguish between what is actually going on in a context and what people in that context think about it, as well as between what the group and the individuals think about it. We outline recommendations for study design and analysis in the study of how teaching shapes students' psychological outcomes. We also elaborate on what researchers and practitioners can learn from the heterogeneous perceptions of students within the same classroom. Educational relevance statement The future of learning includes not only ensuring students are able to learn concepts and disciplinary skills, but also that they are able to become the best versions of themselves, to become forces for good in the world and in their communities, and to experience inclusion, support, and joy in school along the way. To accomplish these goals, the essential ingredients of psychologically sustaining school contexts must be well understood, but currently researchers don't have clear or consistent ways to think about and study these essential ingredients. Motivational climate theory contributes clarity to the understanding of psychologically sustaining school contexts by identifying three important processes: motivational supports, motivational climates, and motivational microclimates. Understanding how these three processes work together in classrooms provides a tool for educators to consider metrics of effectiveness for their practices and to more effectively pinpoint promising targets for intervention or changes in practice.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".