An Investigation of university intraclassroom atmosphere from perceived empathic communication levels

The purpose of the study is to investigate the perceived emphatic classroom atmosphere of the teachers in a college setting, as the various subject area teachers are perceived in a humanistic or non humanistic perspective regarding to the transactions they raarae with their students in a instructional or other relationships. In addition to this main aim, the study is also prone to include variables as students' achievement level, level of education, sex, parental educational status with the presumption that those variables might have baseline effect on students' perceptions about others. The sample of the study is recruited from three main branches of Science, Social Studies, and Fine Arts Education in College of Education at Karadeniz Teknik University. From Science Education Physics and Mathematics, from Social Studies History and Geography, and from Fine Arts Education Department, Music and Art Education sections were included each with 160 subjects, 80 female and 80 male students. Sex, grade level and department and sectionwise equal sample sizes were achieved, and reflected on the total sample size as of 480. The study is descriptive and causal-comparative between-subject design as well as survey study in nature. As the main instrument of the study, Emphatic Classroom Atmosphere Attitude Scale-ESATÖ developed by ÖZBAY and ŞAHİN (1996) was used with a form for demographics. ESATÖ has 43 items measuring students'perceptions of teachers' emphatic attitudes. It has four subscales, which are emphatic understanding, acceptance, subjective perceiving, and genuinness. For the data analysis, desscriptive statistics, t-test and variance analysis were performed with computer package program of SPSS. In a between- subject format, grup differences of departments, sex, parental educational levels were investigated. The study is mainly backed by Carl Rogers' Client-Centered Therapy and Student- Centered Teaching which carries a humanistic orientation or framework. In this study theoretically-driven concepts of emphaty, acceptance, subjective perceiving, and genuinness were investigated in a intraclassroom fashion as the perceived attitudes in a interaction between students and teachers. From the findings, there is a diference among Science, Social studies and Art teachers in terms of their intraclassroom attitudes toward studenst. As the results revealed, fine art techers are more inclined to show emphatic-oriented toward students than Science and Social Studies. Students who are successful and has more parental educational level have more tendencies of perceiving their teacher as humanistic. Female students were found to be perceving intraclassroom atmosphere more empathic or humanistic vinthan the male counterparts. The results are discussed with the earlier findings, and relevant recommendation as well as further researh directions are given. rx