Key Takeaway: This article will strengthen educators’ understanding of the research related to student belonging. A key, and unexpected finding was that adult relationships tended to foster belonging among students more so than peer relationships. In fact, across all factors examined in this study, teacher support had the strongest positive impact.
Criteria: extensive meta-analysis performed across 51 contemporary studies relevant to student belonging
Title: What schools need to know about fostering school belonging: A meta-analysis
Year: 2018
Author: Allen, Kelly; Kern, Margaret L.; Vella-Brodrick, Dianne; Hattie, Jon; Waters, Lea.
Primary Author: Kelly Allen
Summation and Insights:
Belonging, which is generally defined as the extent to which students feel included and respected in a school social environment, has been a subject of inquiry across numerous educational studies. Belonging is of particular interest to educators, as it appears to be especially relevant to the experiences of adolescents (ages 12 to 18). This research study performed a meta-analysis on belonging and examined relevant quantitative data across 51 studies. The purpose of the study was to examine several factors correlated with belonging in school systems and to tease out which ones had the strongest positive correlations. The factors examined included: academic motivation, emotional stability, personal characteristics, parent support, peer support, teacher support, gender, race and ethnicity, extracurricular activities and environmental/school safety. Though all of these are important factors, the most significant in this meta-analysis turned out to be teacher support and personal characteristics; more rural environments also strongly affected several of these factors and their tendency to correlate positively with school belonging.
One surprising finding of this study was that adult relationships tended to foster belonging among students more so than peer relationships. In fact, across all factors examined in this study, teacher support had the strongest positive correlation with students feeling a sense of belonging. This was counter to expectations, given the saliency of peer relationships for adolescents. Teacher support could further be broken down into the following components: creating spaces for autonomy, support, involvement, caring relationships, fairness, and friendliness. It was found that students who believe that they have positive relationships with their teachers and that their teachers are caring and fair tend to have a higher sense of belonging. Parent support also ranked more highly than peer support, and the findings of this study suggest that schools can benefit from enlisting parents and caregivers in whole-school approaches toward fostering school belonging. Some specific recommendations on this front by the authors include: involving parents in school life, including parent information sessions geared toward assisting parents with fostering positive parent-child relationships and prioritizing educational goals.
After teacher support, positive personal characteristics had the highest positive correlation with experiences of school belonging. Specific positive personal characteristics that were noted included conscientiousness, optimism and self-esteem. Positive personal characteristics have also been noted by psychological disciplines as correlates of good social relationships. Almost all the studies analyzed demonstrated that positive personal characteristics had moderate to high correlations with school belonging. A second significant individual factor that demonstrated a notable correlation with school belonging was emotional stability. As such, the authors of this study recommend support for mental health promotion in schools, including the early identification of students with mental health concerns by school staff members. As social support from others may act as a buffer against depressive symptoms, the themes of parent, peer, and teacher support identified in this study were considered a promising resource for future interventions related to promoting mental health and social well-being and a potential basis for actionable programs such as peer to peer coaching and mentoring.
A third component of this study involved examining broader system factors and their relation to school belonging. The researchers questioned if measures of school belonging were consistent across different countries, contingent on a certain year (this was discerned by examining the publication date of the different studies that were examined in this meta-analysis), and if geographic location (rural or urban) was a factor. The only factor here which consistently made an appearance was geographic location, with rural areas consistently producing more school belonging than urban areas. The authors of this study hypothesize that this may be related to smaller class sizes, less disciplinary problems, greater participation in extra-curricular activities, and more time for individual student-teacher interactions in rural schools. Academic motivation and variables related to valuing academics, though present in urban settings, only correlated positively with a sense of belonging in rural and suburban settings.