Estudos da associação entre clima escolar e o desempenho médio de alunos do 5º ano do ensino fundamental

Abstract

This thesis deals with the relationship between school environment and cognitive performance of students. In order to study this, we analyzed several studies investigating the impact of school environment on students learning. We observed the polysemic nature of this concept, including elements of various types, which related sometimes to the physical environment and sometimes to the quality of interpersonal relationships in school space. More commonly, objective aspects (material conditions, teacher training and infrastructure among others) as well as subjective ones (interpersonal relationships, feelings and perceptions) are present in the same study. As a working hypothesis, we believed that these heterogeneous definitions of school environment make it difficult to verify the specific effect of the objective and subjective aspects involved, which may exert different influences (and even conflicting ones) on learning, depending on the actual working conditions of schools. The overall aim of this study was to analyze the school environment based on the perception of elementary school students from public schools of Minas Gerais in relation to various aspects of school life and to determine their relationship to the performance of these students. From the methodological point of view, the theoretical model adopted here was validated and subsequent statistical analyses were carried out to check a possible relationship between school environment and students average performance. For this, we applied the contextual questionnaire and the results of the tests of Portuguese and Mathematics, given by the Public Basic Education System Assessment Program (PROEB) in 2011, to 275,366 5th grade elementary school pupils from 4,091 public schools evaluated in the State of Minas Gerais. The findings point to the existence of a positive relationship between the school environment model used and students performance. More specifically, the results show that students' perception of a satisfactory school environment is strongly associated with high performance in the tests given. Furthermore, an exploratory study was carried out in this paper on the factors which could distinguish schools in the high performance group and good school environment from those with poor performance and poor school environment. We found statistically significant differences between these two groups of schools in the students' observations regarding aspects linked to their perceptions of pedagogical practices, ways of coexistence and management practices in their schools.