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.
Personal characteristics Personal characteristics refer to students' distinctive qualities, traits, personality, emotions, and attributes, and have been consistently identified as a substantial determinant of school belonging. Personal characteristics can be classified as either positive or negative. Positive personal characteristics such as self-esteem, self-efficacy, positive affect, and effective emotional regulation have been shown to help foster students' sense of school belonging. A study by Xin Ma found that students' self-esteem had the greatest impact on school belonging compared to all other personal factors. Conversely, negative personal characteristics like anxiety, depressive symptoms, heightened stress, negative affect, and mental illness can lower students' perceptions of school belonging. Emotional instability can further influence school belonging by negatively affecting students' educational experiences.
Social relationships Social relationships are involved in developing students' feelings of belonging within a school. There are large, positive correlations between school belonging and positive social relations with peers, teachers, and parents. Support, acceptance, and encouragement from these sources can help students develop the feeling that they connect and identify with their school.
Peers
Peer relations have been identified as a direct contributor to students' development of school belonging. Positive social relations with peers involve feelings of acceptance, connection, encouragement, academic and social support, trust, closeness, and caring. Such qualities within a peer relationship can significantly facilitate students' feelings of school belonging. When students are rejected or unsupported by their peers, they may experience anxiety, stress, and alienation. This alters their perceptions of belonging at school because the school environment now seems unwelcome and distressing, making it harder to identify and connect with the school.
Parents Relationships with one's parents can have significant implications for students' feelings of school belonging, given that parents typically provide students' first social relationships. Positive parental relations include parents providing academic and social support, healthy communication, encouragement, compassion, acceptance, and safety. Such qualities within parent-child relationships have been shown to foster students' sense of school belonging by influencing their perceived connection with their school environment.
Teachers
Teachers have been identified as being noteworthy contributors to students' feelings of belonging at school. Several academic studies have identified teacher support as the strongest predictor of school belonging compared to support from peers or parents. Teachers can help instil school belonging by developing a safe and healthy classroom climate, providing academic and social support, fostering respect amongst peers, and treating students fairly. Teachers can also promote feelings of school belonging by being friendly, approachable, and making an effort to connect with their students. Teaching practices that seem to promote students' school belonging include scaffolding learning, commending positive behaviors and performance, allowing students autonomy within the classroom, and using academic pressure, such as holding high expectations of students.
Demographic characteristics
Gender The relationship between gender and school belonging is largely inconclusive because research has produced conflicting results. Several studies have found gender differences in perceptions of school belonging: some research indicates that females possess a higher sense of school belonging compared to males, while other studies have found the opposite effect and conclude that males have higher school belonging than females. Other research has demonstrated that school belonging is not at all influenced by gender.
Race and ethnicity Similar to gender, some research on the effect of race and ethnicity on school belonging has found a significant relationship between the two, while other research contradicts these findings. For example, one study found that Black students experience lower feelings of school belonging compared to white students, however, other research has found the opposite pattern or has found no significant influence of race on school belonging at all.
School climate A school's climate can have significant consequences for students feeling like they belong at school. School climate broadly refers to the feelings associated with a school's environment and quality; it is considered to have physical (e.g. adequacy of buildings), social (e.g. interpersonal relationships), and academic dimensions (e.g. teaching quality). School climate influences school belonging through its support (or lack thereof) of students' feelings of connection with and attachment to their school. One important facet of school climate is school safety, which is how safe students feel at school. It includes variables such as a school's safety policies, use of discipline, bullying prevalence, and fairness. School safety is regarded as an important determinant of school belonging. Higher perceptions of school safety is associated with students holding greater feelings of school belonging.
Extracurricular activities