Conclusions and Discussion
The results of this study have described the development and validation of short forms of the Individualized Classroom Environment Questionnaire (ICEQ). In addition to a short form of each instrument measuring perceptions of actual environment, a short form of the ICEQ and CES measuring preferred environment was also developed. The short form of each instrument contains 25 items, provides a rapid and economical assessment of student perceptions of psychosocial characteristics of classroom learning environment, and can be used to provide reliable information about class mean perceptions (rather than individual student perceptions).
Support for the validity of the short forms of the ICEQ was obtained by using the class mean as the unit of analysis in a variety of analyses based on samples of less than 100 science classes. In particular, for each scale in each of the short forms developed, it was found that the correlation actual form was very large, and that the internal consistency reliability and discriminant validity were satisfactory.
Other analyses performed for the actual form of the short version of each instrument attested to each short scale’s ability to differentiate between the perceptions of students in different classrooms, and to its predictive validity (i.e., its ability to predict cognitive and affective outcomes). The ICEQ is likely to be used by researchers, curriculum evaluators, and teachers to replicate, consolidate, and extend the traditions of past research which involved use of the form of these scales and which were discussed in greater detail earlier in this article. Further studies of the predictive validity of the short forms of association between learning outcomes and environment perceptions) could be pursued for a variety of student ages and cultures and using various