| The class environment has a peculiar value to the development of students under the school system in China. This study focused on the structure of class environment in Chinese schools, the influence of the class environment to the development of pupils, and the impact that the head teacher of a class imposes on the class environment.; It has been discovered that class environment has a multidimensional structure. The main dimensions include teacher-student relationship, student-student relationship, order and discipline, competition, and learning load. All of these 5 dimensions are relevant to the developmental results of students. A 5-subscale questionnaire entitled My Class was developed to measure the dimensions.; Life satisfaction, school adaptation, and trait anxiety were selected as the criteria for evaluating the development of the students. With a 2-level Hierarchical Linear Model (HLM), it was found out that both at the individual level and the class level of analysis, the class environment was a strong predictor of the development of students. This effect was even stronger when we predicted the average development of a class based on the average perception of the class.; The Leary-Wubbels model, a two-dimension structure to describe the interpersonal teacher behavior, was used in the study. The result has showed that there is very close relation between the teacher style (characteristics in interpersonal teacher behavior) and the class environment. Each of the variances in the dimensions of the class environment has a significant proportion that can be interpreted by the teacher style. When comparing to other factors, which includes sex and years of teaching of a head teacher, the school identity and the size of a class, and the average SES of the students' families in a class, the teacher style has the strongest effect on the class environment.; A set of hypothetic models about the relationships among the class environment, the teacher style, and the outcome variables of the students has been tested by applying structural equation model (SEM). The results support the main hypotheses that the class environment had direct influence on the students' outcomes, and the class environment itself is affected by the head teacher's interaction style, whereas the main effects of the teacher style on the students' outcomes are mediated by the class environment. |
