Student views of primary schooling

Abstract

This paper describes the rationale and development of a questionnaire designed to measure primary school students’ perceptions of their quality of school life on seven interrelated subscales: general satisfaction, negative affect, teacher‐student relations, social integration, opportunity, achievement, and adventure. Relationships of scale scores with student characteristics and at different levels of analysis are investigated. The data were obtained over the period 1985‐1987 from three samples of year‐5 and year‐6 students at government primary schools in Victoria and the Hunter Region of New South Wales. Altogether 4863 students in 226 classes in 62 schools were involved. Apart from females expressing greater satisfaction than males on most subscales, few relationships were found between the subscale scores and students’ backgrounds. Most interestingly, satisfaction with school life was not, in general, associated with achievement test scores. There were significant and substantial differences between classrooms within schools and among schools, especially for the adventure and the teacher‐student relations subscales.