Research Articles
Sense of belonging refers to the extent to which students feel personally accepted, included, and supported at school, and includes school-based experiences, students’ relationships with teachers and peers, and students’ general feelings about school.
This article reviews 12 meta-analyses of universal, school-based social and emotional learning (SEL) programs for children from early childhood education through high school. The aims were to assess the breath and consistency of outcomes across meta-analyses, and the potential influence of different moderators (i.e., individual, programmatic, ecological, and methodological) on program impacts.
School vision and mission statements are an explicit indication of a school’s priorities. Research has found academic motivation, mental health promotion, and school belonging to be the most frequently cited themes in these statements. The present study sought to examine whether these themes relate to student academic achievement, as indicated by National Assessment Program — Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) scores.
Scholars have amassed robust evidence that teacher-student relationships (TSR) are associated with a multitude of valued student outcomes. Although much of this research has focused on elementary-school students, TSR are vital at the secondary-school level. Drawing from a sample of 922 middle and high school students and their 127 teachers in six different schools, this article examines these relationships with three goals in mind.
The aim of this study was to examine the roles of sense of belonging and gender in the academic outcomes of urban, Latino adolescents. It was expected that sense of belonging would play a different role in males’ and females’ academic adjustment. Participants (N = 143) included mostly Mexican and Puerto Rican seniors from a large, urban high school. The academic outcomes assessed were grade point average, absenteeism, motivation, effort, and educational aspirations and expectations. As hypothesized, females consistently had more positive academic outcomes than males. Sense of school belonging significantly predicted academic outcomes, including academic motivation, effort, and absenteeism. Regression analyses did not show that gender explained differences in the relationship between sense of belonging and academic outcomes. Implications and future directions for research on urban Latino males and females are discussed.