Multicultural School Climate Inventory

Abstract

This paper presents the 22-item Multicultural School Climate Inventory (MSCI), a scale developed to measure students’ perceptions of the multicultural climate of their school. Survey questions were generated from a critical understanding of multicultural education, with attention to culturally and linguistically diverse school children. Through examination of school climate and multicultural literature, a definition of multicultural school climate was generated. 1511 students at a secondary school (grades 8-9) took the survey over a three year period. Grounded in literature, these questions were designed to address the needs of real students attending a specific secondary school. The MSCI proved to be such a helpful tool for examining and ultimately improving multicultural school climate from the perspective of diverse students that the authors share the instrument here, making it available to school faculty and scholars wishing to examine and thereafter improve multicultural school climate. Reliability coefficients and validity measures are reported for the scale, as well as for four subscales that emerged (Liking School, Educator-Student Relationships, Cultural Relevancy, and School Success). Findings suggests that the scale and subscales have high internal consistency and known-group construct validity.

Keywords

• multicultural school climate
• diverse students
• survey instrument