Evaluating the Overstudy Climate at School and in the Family: The Overstudy Climate Scale (OCS)

This study aims to propose an instrument for evaluating the overstudy climate both at school and in the family, from primary school to University. We developed a pool of 30 items covering both parents and teachers’ pressure toward hard study and overt comments concerning students’ academic performance. By means of Exploratory and Confirmatory Factor Analyses conducted on a sample of 530 College students aged between 18 and 56 years (M = 22.27 ± 3.74) we reduced the test to 18 items and three factors: Parents Overstudy Climate (P-OSC); Teachers overstudy climate – Pressure toward hard study (T-OSC-HS); Teachers overstudy climate – Overt comments related to the students’ academic performance (T-OSC-OC). The three scales have good internal reliability and they have a statistically significant negative correlation with the Grade Point Average of the students. Moreover, overstudy climate, and the T-OSC-OC scale especially, is positively correlated with the time spent studying. In conclusion, this study proposes a new instrument with good psychometric properties to be used in future research aiming to evaluate the role of overstudying climate in positive and negative attitudes toward studying, and hence for developing preventive interventions aiming to favor students’ wellbeing and to prevent their dropout from school.