School counseling and classroom climate: Implication for needs assessment and program evaluation

Abstract

The purpose of this article was to use classroom climate assessment strategies to evaluate school counseling programs. “Supportive” climate provides a climate that is conducive to children’s adjustment and healthy development and as such classroom climate can be used as a direct and indirect index of effective school counseling. However, methodological difficulties remain outstanding in assessing classroom climate. One such difficulty concerns the unit-of-analysis in assessment because each scale score supposedly reflects multiple students’ perception of one classroom which they all share. It is a distinctly unique methodological problem associated with climate scales. A history of classroom assessment was reviewed and the Classroom Climate Inventory (Ito & Matsui, 2001) was discussed as an exemplar of a psychometric scale that could be used to address these issues and that may be used for evaluating school counseling programs.