Quality of school life and self-concept among elementary school students

Abstract

The main purpose of this study is to investigate, how much the dimensions of Children Self-Concept Scale, “Behaviour”, “Intellectual and school status”, “Physical appearence and attributes”, “Anxiety”, “Popularity” and “Happiness” estimated the elementary school students’ perceptions about quality of life in their school’s. The participants of the study consist of 493 students (235 girls and 258 boys) who attended to 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th grades from four elementary schools located in Adana central province, Turkey.  Quality of School Life Scale (QSLS) and “Children Self-Concept Scale” were used as data collection tools. Stepwise regression analysis was performed to analyse the gathered data. Results show that, all dimensions of Children Self-concept Scale have significant correlations with quality of school life (p<.001). Results of hierarchic regression analysis show that, the variables of “Behaviour”, “Popularity”, “Happiness”, “Intellectual and school status” and “Anxiety” estimated the elementary school students’ perceptions of quality of school life significantly; but the variable of  “Physical appearence and attributes” has no significant contribution to the estimation. It was found that, the variable of “Behaviour” has the highest contribution to the estimation of students’ quality of school life among these five variables which could be account for 29.2% of the total variance of elementary school students’ perceptions of quality of their school life.