Measuring Students’ Sense of School Catholic Identity

Abstract

As a ministry of the Catholic Church, Catholic schools are charged with educating students’ hearts and minds. Multiple standardized academic tests and other student assessments are available for monitoring both student and teacher outcomes in Catholic schools, but fewer measures exist for considering the school’s faith-related mission. Although tests of student religious knowledge and benchmarks related to specific Catholic elements of the school are available, we do not yet have a robust set of instruments that provide teachers and leaders an understanding of their progress in providing a school environment permeated by Catholic culture and faith. To consider how students in Catholic schools perceive the Catholicity of their school and how these perceptions vary among di ferent student groups, we developed, piloted, and validated the Sense of School Catholic Identity Survey (SSCI). This 20-item survey measures Grade 5 through 8 students’ perceptions of their Catholic school as personal and invitational, sacramental, unitive, and eucharistic. Findings from the pilot study suggest that responses di fer by student grade level, religious tradition, and gender. Future testing of the scale will examine school-level di ferences in Catholic identity.