Abstract:

There is clear evidence that school environment factors have effects on students’ performance and teaching staff teaching and that improving these factors has significant benefits on all. This study examines the effect of school environment on teaching and learning National Social Studies at the high school level in Saudi Arabia. National social studies is merged to be one subject, it was two separate subjects that had been taught in each semester which lead to face a challenge in school environments. This study aims to find the factors that have an impact on learning and teaching this subject.

This paper reports findings from a quantitative survey, private and public students and teachers from different high schools participated in this case study. 98 female students and 79 female teachers participated in the study, students fall in age group of 13-19 years old.

Results show that school environment have medium impact on students learning and teachers teaching because ‘The classrooms are suitable with the number of the students.’, ‘The school environment help in implementing teaching modern techniques’, ‘The appropriate teaching methods are available inside the classrooms’, “The school environment is suitable for the new curriculum”, “Equipment inside the classroom such as projector work efficiently”, “The library have an appropriate sources and references to serve the subject”, all statements are medium impact with an arithmetic mean scale 2.88, 2.95, 2.66, 2.78, 2.46, 2.89, the results also shows that there were only one statement has low impact “The library have an appropriate sources and references to serve the subject”’ with an arithmetic mean 2.14, also the teachers results showed that all statements were medium extent with an arithmetic mean scale of 3.14, 2.59, 2.73, 2.68,2.68, 2.77, 2.35 for the seven statements. The study suggests that implementing modern technology and using multimedia in all aspects of teaching process. This will lead to a great impact on students’ academic achievement.

Keywords:

National Social Studies, School environments, curriculum, High school, Saudi Arabia.