| Abstract: | In October, 1976, a survey was conducted among 1,621 sixth grade pupils located in 30 rural and 30 urban randomly selected East Javanese elementary schools. The purpose of the study was to determine the effects of pupil background characteristics, the home learning environment, school and classroom organizational characteristics, the physical environment of the classroom and the school, teacher characteristics, the classroom learning environment and rural-urban factors upon the acquisition of modern orientations among Indonesian elementary schoolchildren. The study was also designed to develop reliable and valid measures of the key variables used in the conceptual model. The results indicated that reliable and valid instruments could be generated from survey data; specifically, satisfactory scales were developed for the measurement of the following concepts: the home learning environment, the school physical environment, the classroom physical environment, teacher pedagogy, teacher quality, individual modernity, and fifteen characteristics of the classroom learning environment. Correlational and multiple regression analyses showed that individual modernity, the learning outcome, was influenced by both social and educational learning determinants. The most powerful predictors of modernity in the positive direction were class size, the home learning environment, the personal development and relationship dimensions of the classroom learning environment, and the school physical environment. Pupil age and teacher pedagogy (innovativeness) were negatively associated with the criterion. The results also show that modernizing forces are disproportionately concentrated in the urban area. In the multiple regression, the learning determinants accounted for a large enough portion of the variance in the learning outcome (R2 = .262) to be statistically significant from zero at the .001 level. The study shows that the learning of modern culture is a complex phenomenon which is influenced by a wide variety of factors. |
