Globalisation, Education and Policy Research: The Field of Learning Environments in Global Perspective

Since learning outcomes provide an incomplete picture of the educational process, researchers, evaluators, policymakers, and practitioners should pay more attention to the learning environments of classrooms and schools. This chapter facilitates future research and practical applications involving learning environments by reviewing some widely-used questionnaires that assess the perceptions of participant students and teachers at the classroom level (e.g. Science Laboratory Environment Inventory, SLEI; Constructivist Learning Environment Survey, CLES; What Is Happening In this Class?, WIHIC; Questionnaire on Teacher Interaction, QTI) and the school level (e.g. School-Level Environment Questionnaire, SLEQ; What’s Happening In This School, WHITS). To illustrate the global reach of research on learning environments, Table 2 briefly summarizes details of 58 studies that utilized the WIHIC in 16 languages and in 26 countries in a large range of research and practical applications. To facilitate future use of the WIHIC globally, all its items are conveniently provided in Appendix A.