Abstract:

The main purpose of this study is to investigate the sense of school belonging and empathic classroom atmosphere among secondary school students.The sample of the study consisted of 608 sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade students from secondary schools in Adana central districts in 2011-2012 school year.Psychological Sense of School Membership Scale (PSSM) and the Perceived Intra-Classroom Empathic Atmosphere Scale (IEAS, Özbay and Shahin, 2000) were used as data collection tools. To analyze the gathered data, means and standard deviation distribution were investigated and independent samples ttest, one way analysis of variance, and correlation analysis were performed. Results of these analysis showed that the sense of school belonging and emphatic classroom of the students were around the average points of the scales. A positive significant relationship was found between students' sense of school belonging and emphatic classroom atmosphere

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