Synthesis of National Research on School Climate in Czech Republic: A Scoping Review

Abstract

Educators have been attuned to the importance of school climate for more than 100 years (Cohen, McCabe, Michelli, & Pickeral, 2009). School climate is an ecologically informed idea that recognizes individual, small and large group trends about a range of safety, relationships, teaching & learning and environmental issues that shape student learning and their development. School climate is measurable. Over the last three decades, school climate has become a growing focus for educational practice and policy leaders around the world (Ruiz et al, 2021; Cohen & Espelage, 2020; Thapa et al, 2013). As a result, we suggest that school climate and school-climate informed improvement efforts need to be studied on national levels (Vicente et al, 2021). Berkowitz's recent national-level study on positive school climate and its relationship to socioeconomic status and achievement of Arabic speaking students in Israel (Berkowitz, 2017 & 2020), has proved to be highly relevant bringing solutions to global issues (Bradshaw, et al. 2021). Our scoping review was conducted to advocate for the importance of school climate and for its role to inform national policy. It took place in the Czech Pedagogical Bibliographic Database of the J. A. Komenský Pedagogical Library in June 2020. The reasons for choosing this database were its terminologically unified annotation of bibliographic records using the Czech Pedagogical Thesaurus and its intentional scope to cover pedagogical literature (Email communication, Petišková, May 6th, 2020; Petrovičová, 2012). In the first step, we searched by the keyword "school climate" (in Czech) and identified a total of 383 bibliographic records. Using a programming script created for the purpose of our study by a university librarian, we identified a total of 2550 keyword combinations with the keyword "school climate." The keyword "school climate" was most often associated with the keyword "primary school" (N = 113). The second most frequent combination was "school climate" and "school environment" (N = 103). The third most numerous combination was "school climate" and "interpersonal relationships" (N = 92). The fourth most numerous combination was "school climate" and "teacher-student relationship" (N = 92). School climate is being studied in the Czech Republic on the primary and lower secondary school level, as well as in relational contexts.