MS WEIRD: Social Belonging Research

What does academic tenacity look like? Academically tenacious students exhibit the following characteristics and behaviors:
■■ They believe that they belong in school academically and socially. School is part of who they are and is seen as a route to future goals, such as providing for their families or contributing to their community or society.
■■ They are engaged in learning, view effort positively, and can forego immediate pleasures for the sake of schoolwork. For example, they seek challenging tasks that will help them learn new things, rather than tasks in their comfort zone that require little effort, but also provide little opportunity to learn.
■■ They are not derailed by difficulty, be it intellectual or social. They see a setback as an opportunity for learning or a problem to be solved rather than as a humiliation, a condemnation of their ability or worth, a symbol of future failures, or a confirmation that they do not belong. This is true in the case of a specific assignment as well as with their studies in general.
■■ They know how to remain engaged over the long haul and how to deploy new strategies for moving forward effectively.

This article is based on a multiple case study which examines the lives of a group of 11 former international school students who all attended an international school
between 20 and 50 years ago. The research design was based on a review of the literature on third culture kids and adult third culture kids, covering emotional and
relational issues such as sense of belonging, identity and the nature of relationships formed. Data were gathered
through both postal questionnaires and in depth interviews and multi-dimensional pictures of the lives of the former international students have been generated.
Links between the literature and personal experiences are explored.

This article discusses the development and validation of a measure of adolescent students' perceived belonging or psychological membership in the school environment. An initial set of items was administered to early adolescent students in one suburban middle school (N = 454) and two multi-ethnic urban junior high schools (N = 301). Items with low variability and items detracting from scale reliability were dropped, resulting in a final 18-item Psychological Sense of School Membership (PSSM) scale, which had good internal consistency reliability with both urban and suburban students and in both English and Spanish versions. Significant findings of several hypothesized subgroup differences in psychological school membership supported scale construct validity. The quality of psychological membership in school was found to be substantially correlated with self-reported school motivation, and to a lesser degree with grades and with teacher-rated effort in the cross-sectional scale development studies and in a subsequent longitudinal project. Implications for research and for educational practice, especially with at-risk students, are discussed.

Collaborative learning has much to offer but not all learners participate fully and peer groups can be exclusive. The article examines how belonging or 'congruence' in learning groups is related to identities of gender, age, ethnicity and socio-economic status. A study of student experiences of collaborative learning on three different blended learning courses illustrated how learners negotiate identity congruence with peer groups to belong and engage. An analytical framework that distinguishes social, operational and knowledge-related identity congruence has emerged. Contrary to received wisdom, the social aspect appears least important for learner engagement while knowledge-related identity congruence is fundamental. Some of the consequences of identity incongruence, particularly concerning gender and maturity, are discussed and the article points towards the pedagogies which might enable identities of group members to shift so that collaborative learning can flourish.

Defining sense of community as a feeling of belongingness within a group, this article reviews research about students' sense of acceptance within the school community to address three questions: Is this experience of belongingness important in an educational setting? Do students currently experience school as a community? And how do schools influence students' sense of community? Conceptually, the review reflects a social cognitive perspective on motivation. This theoretical framework maintains that individuals have psychological needs, that satisfaction of these needs affects perception and behavior, and that characteristics of the social context influence how well these needs are met. The concern here is how schools, as social organizations, address what is defined as a basic psychological need, the need to experience belongingness. The findings suggest that students' experience of acceptance influences multiple dimensions of their behavior but that schools adopt organizational practices that neglect and may actually undermine students' experience of membership in a supportive community.

Not only were the students able to talk through the underlying issues of the fight, but the student who would have been suspended ended up feeling reconnected to the school community, not alienated. And, she became a big advocate for restorative practices, often pushing students in conflict to meet with the social and emotional coach to work out their problems.