School belonging

The most commonly used definition of school belonging comes from a 1993 academic article by researchers Carol Goodenow and Kathleen Grady, who describe school belonging as "the extent to which students feel personally accepted, respected, included, and supported by others in the school social environment." The construct of school belonging involves feeling connected with and attached to one's school. It also encompasses involvement and affiliation with one's school community. Conversely, students who do not feel a strong sense of belonging within their school environment are frequently described as being alienated or disaffected. There are a number of terms within educational research that are used interchangeably with school belonging, including school connectedness, school attachment, and school engagement. School belonging is determined by a myriad of factors, including academic achievement and motivation, personal characteristics, social relationships, demographic characteristics, school climate, and participation in extracurricular activities. Research indicates that school belonging has significant implications for students, as it has been consistently linked with academic outcomes, psychological adjustment, well-being, identity formation, mental health, and physical health—it is considered a fundamental aspect of students' development. A sense of belonging to one's school is considered particularly important for adolescents because they are within a period of transition and identity formation, and research has found that school belonging significantly declines during this period. Psychological Sense of School Membership (PSSM), developed in 1993, is one of the measures to ascertain the degree to which students feel a sense of school belonging. Students rate the extent to which they agree or disagree with statements, such as "People here notice when I'm good at something." In 2003, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention held an international convention where the Wingspread Declaration on School Connections was developed as a group of tactics to increase students' sense of belonging and connection with their school.

Prevalence and trajectory Research indicates that many students have deficient feelings of school belonging. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has an investigated school belonging and disaffection in students around the world since 2003. Their most recent collection of data occurred in 2018. Approximately 600,000 students representing 32 million 15 years olds (aged between 15 years 3 months and 16 years 2 months) from 79 countries and economies participated in PISA 2018. Their analyses revealed that a significant proportion of students around the world are lacking strong feelings of belongingness to school. On average, a third of all students surveyed felt they did not belong to their school. In addition, they found that one in five students feels like an outsider at school and one in six reports feeling lonely. In most of the education systems, students who were socio-economically felt less belonging to school. On average student belonging to school declined by 2% between 2015 and 2018. The portion of students who do not feel like they belong to school has increased since 2003 indicating a trend in the deterioration of school belonging globally. School belonging tends to decrease as students grow older, as indicated in several different research studies. In one study involving students from Latin America, Asia, and Europe, researchers Cari Gillen-O'Neel and Andrew Fuligni found that in childhood, students generally report high levels of school belonging. However, once students transition into middle school and adolescence, their perceptions of school belonging drop significantly. Similarly, a separate study found that students' school belonging decreased in the transition from middle to high school; these students also displayed an increase in depressive symptoms and a decline in social support, which could be considered either causes or consequences of the decline in school belonging. This trend has been replicated in many other studies, suggesting that school belonging declines once students reach adolescence.

Determinants A meta-analysis of 51 studies (N = 67,378) by K. Allen and colleagues (2018) identified that there are multiple individual and social level factors that influence school belonging. These core themes include academic factors, personal characteristics, social relationships, demographic characteristics, school climate and extra-curricular activities. For many of the determinants of school belonging, it is likely that each of them have a reciprocal relationship with a student's sense of belonging. That is, they operate as both an antecedents or consequences.

Academic factors Research has documented the influence of academic factors (i.e. achievement, motivation, hardiness, interest in school) on students' school belonging. Academic achievement, or one's skills and competencies in school, has been identified as a substantial predictor of school belonging. For example, research has demonstrated that students' grade point averages (GPAs), a common measure of academic achievement, are positively associated with school belonging. This means that students who have higher GPAs have higher levels of school belonging. Studies have also found several measures of academic motivation to be determinants of students' school belonging. Academic motivation encompasses behaviors such as homework completion, setting goals, expectancy of success, and effort and engagement within the classroom. Carol Goodenow and Kathleen Grady found each of these sub-sects of academic motivation to be significant predictors of students' perceptions of school belonging. More recent research has replicated these findings, suggesting that academic motivation plays an important role in developing feelings of school belonging. In addition, students' perceived value of school influences their school belonging: when they perceive their assignments and education as instructive, meaningful, and valuable, they are more likely to report greater school belonging.

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