Three Decades of School Climate Research in Czech Republic: A Scoping Review with Significant Outcomes
Abstract
Problem Description This scoping review sums up the scope of the Czech research literature on school climate for the last three decades. The motive for conducting this scoping review is to understand the state of school climate research in Czech Republic in terms of its general scope.
We argue, that school climate research has the capability to inform educational policy when it is systematically reviewed. This scoping review defines the scope of future systematic reviews for the area of school climate.
The general aim of a scoping review is the synthesis of scientific literature and the subsequent assessment of its focus (Tricco et al, 2018). School climate (Cohen & Espelage, 2020) and scoping reviews (Harden et al, 2006) are generally used to inform educational policy around the world.
Our main research question is: What is the focus of Czech school climate literature for the period 1991-2020? From the very beginning, choosing the right keyword and choosing the database with which we intended to perform the search was very important for us to obtain relevant results. We believe that areas of research that do not have clear terminological clarifications require a higher stop on the selection of terms and databases in which we search.
In the case of the school climate, the terminological ambiguity is relatively well known (Cumming et al, 2017, p. 17). However, it should be noticed that it is not the only area of research where it is necessary to pay attention to the clarification of terminological concepts.
It is also marked by attempts to unify terminological ambiguities. The term "school climate" was used when conducting this scoping review due to its systematic inclusion in Czech Pedagogical Thesaurus (CPT), which is a systematic gathering of pedagogical terma in Czech Republic.
CPT has assigned the term "school climate" a total of 683 records. The fact that the term "school climate" is included in the thesaurus in practice means that it has often appeared in the keywords of publications.
Keywords are created in the Pedagogical Bibliographic Database (PBD) based on content analysis of records. Terms that are often mentioned as keywords in publications in the PBD are moved to the hierarchical position of the thesaurus (Email communication, Petišková, May 6, 2020).
The use of the thesaurus as a basis for terminological clarity in databases is also utilzed, for example, at the United Nations. It serves as a categorization tool, is multidisciplinary in nature and is regularly updated in the Dag Hammarskjöld Library of the United Nations Department of Public Information (About the UNBIS Thesaurus).
Research Method The scoping review was conducted in the Pedagogical Bibliographic Database (PBD) of the J. A.
Komenský Pedagogical Library in Prague (during June 2020) and in cooperation with a librarian of the Faculty of Education at Charles University. The reason for choosing this database is its systematic and terminologically uniform annotation of bibliographic records using the Czech Pedagogical Thesaurus (CPT) (Petrovičová, 2012; Email communication, Petišková, May 6, 2020).
We thus respond to the relatively well-known need for terminological unity in the field of research of foreign students and the school climate both at home and abroad (Thapa et al, 2012). In the first step, we searched for keywords related to the school climate by searching with the keyword "school climate" in the Pedagogical Bibliographic Database (PBD).
In the second step, we extracted all inter-connections of all keywords by using a specially designed script. In the third step, we cleaned up the data by removing duplicates and created a set of keywords that were associated with the keyword "school climate" by frequency in each bibliographical record.
Expected/Temporary Results Tricci et al (2018) who created a protocol specifically to increase the quality of scoping reviews, is methodologically based on the studies of Arksey & O'Malley (2005) and Levac et al (2010). The aim of the protocol is to contribute to the transparency of data collection through scoping review.
Scoping reviews have a different goal compared to systematic reviews. Their aim is to synthesize the literature and subsequently assess the focus of the literature on a particular topic (Tricco et al, 2018).
Since these was exactly our research question (namely: What is the focus of Czech school climate literature for the period 1991-2020?), the scoping review was very suitable. The main feature of a scoping review is a higher degree of coverage, which was in our case achieved by selecting broader criteria when searching in Pedagogical Bibliographic Database (PBD).
In the search, we focused on the relevance of the database in which we performed the search (Stansfield et al, 2012) to follow recommendations on enhancing quality of review studies (Gough, 2013). Searching by using the keyword "school climate", we identified a total of 383 records in Czech in the Pedagogical Bibliographic Database (PBD).
Using a script, we identified a total of 2550 keyword combinations with the keyword "school climate." In the records of the Pedagogical Bibliographic Database (PBD), the keyword "school climate" was most often associated with the keyword "primary school" (N = 113). The second most numerous 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).
In general, it can be noted that the identified scope of school climate, indicate that Czech school climate literature (CSCL) is mostly focused on studying school as an institution ("elementary school" and "school environment") and in relational contexts ("interpersonal relationships" and "teacher-student relationship").