Measuring classroom climate: Validation of the CCQ-P for primary, middle school and high school levels, on the Romanian population

•The CCQ-P has good internal validity for surveys on primary, middle and high school.•The CCQ-P has good configural invariance across different school levels.•Classroom Climate Questionnaire – Primary has a good fit on the Romanian population. Several high-quality instruments are used for investigations on classroom climate. Out of these, none is valid on all three educational pre-tertiary levels (primary, middle school and high school). This situation limits our understanding about classroom climate along different educational levels. We collected responses on a large Romanian student sample (1003 students, 49.3 % boys), and we investigated the internal validity of the Classroom Climate Questionnaire – Primary (CCQ-P, Aldridge & Galos, 2018) using confirmatory factor analyses and measurement invariance analyses. The original model obtained a good fit and partially maintained structure across the three educational levels. Thus, this study opens the door for the investigation of this questionnaire for the three pre-university levels in other national contexts. This could impact how we look at the transition of students between levels and it could offer new input about the practical actions related to this process.