CLASSROOM LEARNING ENVIRONMENT AS PREDICTOR OF ACHIEVEMENT AMONG HIGHER SECONDARY STUDENTS OF COMMERCE STREAM

Education is a continuous process and makes a person well-versed with the latest information and knowledge. ‘Commerce' includes two types of activities, viz., Trade and Auxiliaries to trade. ‘Buying and Selling of goods' is termed as trade. But there are a lot of other activities that are required to facilitate the purchase and sale of goods. These are called services or auxiliaries/aid to trade viz.- transport, banking, insurance, communication, advertisement, packaging and warehousing. Commerce education is considered as the backbone of business and it should be in tune with the changing trends. Commerce education has to play a crucial role in our society comprising of various political affiliations, religious institutions, economic units where, expertise of knowledge related to the field of commerce is very much essential. The term ‘Achievement' refers to the degree or the level of success attained in some specific school tasks especially scholastic performances and in this sense academic achievement means the attained ability by the students to perform scholastic tasks, which may be general or specific to a given subject area. ‘Classroom Learning Environment' or ‘Classroom Climate' may be defined as classroom conditions, processes and psychological stimuli which influence the educational achievements of the children. It refers to those forces in the environment of the learner which have the potentiality to contribute to academic development of the learner. It may contain psycho-social conditions that characterize the overall interpersonal feeling tones existing within it. They are capable enough to affect the learning of the students. The present study has been conducted to find out whether the perceived stimulation of classroom learning environment by higher secondary students of commerce stream can predict their commerce achievement? The sample for the present study consists of 600 students (male=300 and female=300) selected with the help of multi stage stratified random sampling method from various higher secondary schools situated in Allahabad district (affiliated to U. P. board, Allahabad). For the purpose of data collection ‘Learning Environment Inventory (LEI)' developed by K. S. Misra has been used and to find out achievement in commerce, the ‘Commerce Achievement Test (CAT)' constructed and standardized by the investigator was administered on the students. ‘Step-wise Multiple Regression analysis' technique has been used to find out the predictions. Major findings of the study revealed that five dimensions of classroom learning environment can predict up to the extent of 13.1 % of the variance in commerce achievement and these dimensions of classroom learning environment in descending order are- apathy (6.8%), diversity (3.2%), encouragement (1.6%), democratic orientation (0.9%) and competition (0.6%) respectively.