School Culture

Purpose: This research was conducted with the aim of studying the relationship between school culture and social climate governing school with academic ethics and mediating role of educational buoyancy. Methodology: The present study is descriptive, cross-sectional, purposeful, applied, and essentially a descriptive survey. It has been surveyed by a questionnaire. The statistical population of the study was all boys' high school students in Bojnourd city who were 5172 people. Of these, 382 were selected by relative sampling according to the Morgan table for participation in the research. The research tools consisted of Alessandro and Sadh School Culture (1997), Social Psychosocial Class Questionnaire (Frazer, Giddings and McBurby, 1995), Educational Buoyancy Questionnaire (Hossein Chari and Dehghanizadeh, 2012), and Educational Ethics Questionnaire (Golparvar, 2010). The validity of the instrument was of formal and content type, while its reliability calculated by Cronbach's alpha coefficient for school culture questionnaire turned out to be 0.939, Psycho-social 0.84, academic buoyancy 0.837 and academic ethics 0.869. Data were collected from questionnaires using descriptive statistics (frequency distribution, mean, standard deviation and calculation of central indicators and dispersion); to find the results of the research hypotheses, inferential tests including multiple regression analysis was employed using SPSS software (version 19). Also to test the validity of the theoretical model and calculate the effect coefficients Structural Equation Modeling Method with Lisrel 8.8 software was used. Findings: The results showed that there is a relationship between school culture and social climate governing school with students' academic ethics. There is also a relationship between school culture and students' academic buoyancy. Also, academic buoyancy has a mediator role in relation to school culture and students' academic ethics (p> 0.05). Conclusion: The findings show that there is a relationship between school culture and students’ educational ethics, so by upgrading and strengthening school culture, students' academic ethos will be consolidated. Also, school culture has a positive and significant effect on the basic psychological needs of autonomy, competence and communication.

The role of culture in planning and implementing educational reforms and in impacting the quality of the education system has rarely been discussed. This study aims to identify the features of culture in governmental primary schools for girls in Iran aged 7‒12 years. Using an ethnographic approach, qualitative data were collected and analysed. The data were collected based on a triangulation strategy, through observation, in-depth interviews with teachers, and content analysis of the Document for Fundamental Transformation of the Education System. Thematic analysis was used to discover, analyse, and interpret the pattern of data meanings. The findings reveal that specific components represent the culture of these schools: a uniform education system, bureaucratic structure of schools, square-shape architecture of schools, national curriculum, arbitrary relationships between members of the school community, and the professional development of teachers based on the top-down command. The shared values of school members and behaviour norms are concerned with the exact execution of policies and plans issued in the form of circulars from the Ministry of Education, which shape the daily activities of school members; this has led to the emergence of a culture of obedience, wherein the members comply with the expectations, prescribed policies, and plans set by the Ministry of Education. Although studies acknowledge the importance of identifying cultural context, school culture has rarely been investigated in governmental primary schools for girls in Iran. This study highlights the role of education policymakers in maintaining and solidifying the existing culture in these schools.