A Systematic Review of Secondary School Climate Assessments

A systematic review was conducted to identify emergent trends in the assessment of secondary school climate. Comparisons of assessments published in the past 6 years (2016–2021) and those published prior to 2016 (total N = 46) revealed recent shifts related to conceptualization, validity, accessibility, and recommendations for improving school climate. Notably, newer assessments were more likely than older assessments to use technology to administer surveys and disseminate reports. Based on a general lack of psychometric data, we call for more attention towards the validation of school climate assessments, especially with attention towards school climate as reflecting both school-level and individual-level differences. As an exploratory analysis, we also compared features between assessments that were published in peer-reviewed journals ( n = 33) to those published in the gray literature (whitepapers, evaluation reports; n = 10). More of the peer-reviewed assessments had undergone psychometric testing (88%) than those that were not peer-reviewed (60%), but fewer peer-reviewed assessments offered reports (49%) than those that were not peer-reviewed (80%), likely reflecting differing goals. Integrating features from across assessments could serve to create a single omnibus assessment with maximum utility for both research and practice.