The Centrality of Connectedness: A Conceptual Synthesis of Attending, Belonging, Engaging and Flowing (original) (raw)
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Measuring students’ sense of connectedness with school
2004
The current emphasis on performance outcomes in schools has threatened to eclipse the importance of social connectedness as an antecedent to student success. Presented is an instrument designed to measure student sense of connectedness with school based on relevant dimensions provided in the literature: student sense of belonging, engagement, expected learning, and trust. Drawing on data from over 3,000 US students from six high schools, exploratory factor analysis yielded six latent factors based on 31 of 46 original items: students’ sense of belonging with peers; teacher support; fairness and safety; academic engagement; engagement in the broader community; and relatedness of self with school. Confirmatory factor analysis yielded acceptable preliminary fit measures. Preliminary path analyses suggest that students’ sense of relatedness with school mediates their relative propensity toward academic engagement, with the other factors antecedent. Schools seeking to obtain reliable mea...
Promoting connectedness through whole-school approaches: a qualitative study
Health Education, 2009
A A Q Qu ua al li it ta at ti iv ve e S St tu ud dy y Abstract Purpose: School connectedness, or a sense of belonging to the school environment, is an established protective factor for child and adolescent health, education, and social well-being. While a comprehensive, whole-school approach that addresses the school organisational environment is increasingly endorsed as an effective approach to promote connectedness, how this approach creates a sense of belonging in the school environment requires systematic in-depth exploration. This paper aims to address these issues.
Fostering school connectedness
School connectedness refers to the extent to which youth perceive positive support or caring from individual adults in their school setting. Overall, school connectedness revolves around the idea that when young people consistently receive empathy, attention, and praise at school they feel a sense of belonging and support that is the springboard for healthy growth and development. Connectedness to school has been shown to protect against violence, risky sexual behavior, drug use, and dropping out of school. Moreover, youth at school who feel good, perceive meaningful attachment to adults, and possess a sense of belonging are also more likely to feel engaged, to work harder, and to be involved with positive activities in and outside of school time. It also instills in youth the desire to invest, trust, and give back to the individuals and institutions that support them. School connectedness has emerged as such an important factor in understanding youth development and behavior that o...
Social Psychology of Education
This study investigated school connectedness, student engagement, academic grades, and student affect. Factor analyses of 331 adolescent students (Years 7, 9, and 11 in Australia), validated a four-factor model of school engagement. The factors revealed in the analyses were described as (1) future and task focus, (2) planning and motivation, (3) positive roles and models, and (4) positive social engagement. Cluster analyses revealed two typologies of students: a thriving group scoring significantly higher on all four factors than a striving group. There was a consistent number of students in each group across Years 7, 9 and 11. Compared to students in the striving group, on average, students in the thriving group scored significantly higher on grades (i.e., mathematics and English). Moreover, students in the thriving group were significantly higher on content and excited affects, and significantly less depressed and distressed compared to the students in the striving group. Limitati...
3rd international conference on educational and educational psychology UK, 2012
During 2012, session chairs, members of the ICEEPSY Scientific Committee, and Board Reviewers met in Turkey to review 1,500 abstracts submitted by persons representing more than 55 countries of which 700 were accepted and 400 of them registered and will be published. Three hundred seventy papers were accepted and published in 2011, and hundred and twenty in 2010. Abstracts accepted this year by ICEEPSY (ISSN Number 1986-3020) published and the full text of papers will be published by Elsevier in ICEEPSY 2012 Proceedings or by ICEEPSY (ISBN 978-9963-9888-0-8).
Springer, 2023
The theoretical and empirical literature has long included belonging as central to student engagement. Some conceptualizations and approaches have suggested that a student's sense of belonging is a central and foundational principle underpinning engagement. Engagement also contributes to a sense of belonging. Two distinct literatures have developed insights around the importance of, pathways to, and outcomes associated with each construct. This chapter narratively explores similarities and differences between belonging and student engagement, identifying areas of overlap as well as helpful distinctions, with implications for research and educational practice. Although the two are closely connected, these two friends are more effectively treated as complementary constructs, both of which are essential components for positive development in young people.
The Educational and Developmental Psychologist, 2016
School belonging is generally regarded as a student's sense of affiliation or connection to his or her school. Anyone who has personally navigated the sometimes torturous terrain of secondary school is able to have some level of direct understanding of the importance that belonging, fitting in, and identifying with a school holds for most people. Educators and practitioners often work with young people who feel that they do not belong to the school community, in which they attend. An absence of belonging can manifest itself in mental health concerns, school attrition, and risk taking behaviours. Opportunities for early intervention through fostering school belonging are born from a greater understanding and awareness of what school belonging is and how it is contextualised and fostered. This special issue aims to place a focus on school belonging and highlight it as a significant social issue of our time. A powerful impetus for this special issue was to create a resource which offers a high level of applied impact for both researchers and practitioners. This is evident in the high quality and variance in the collection of articles that are presented in this issue. The first paper of this special issue by Slaten, Ferguson, Allen, Vella-Brodick and Waters, School belonging: A review of the history, current trends, and future directions, provides an overview of school belonging through a review of literature that describes the current context, trends and relevancy for future research. Most notable in this article is a discussion of school belonging in the university context. Given that the overarching school belonging literature is mainly concerned with issues in primary and secondary schools, this article is unique in exploring new ground in tertiary settings, where there is a dearth of academic research. The second article of this special issue, by Furlong, Moffa, and Dowdy, provides further insight into the application of school belonging in school settings by examining the construct's value in mental health screening for psychological distress and life satisfaction. In their article, Exploring the contributions of school belonging to complete mental health screening, the authors found that students who reported high levels of life satisfaction and normative distress (" thriving ") reported a higher sense of belonging than students who experienced low life satisfaction and elevated distress (" troubled "). In the second part of their analysis, they found that school belonging served as a predictor for social and emotional wellbeing one year on, but offered very little explained variance towards psychological distress symptoms. The authors argue that, although school belonging did not contribute substantially to psychological distress, it still has an important place in the complete mental health screening of secondary school students. The special issue is particularly interested in considering school belonging in a range of populations. This is exemplified by Due, Riggs and Augoustinos, who used a novel methodology of photographic elicitation techniques in their paper, ii The Educational and Developmental Psychologist
Exploring the Dependency of Type of School and Age with Adolescent Connectedness
Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, 2014
The research aimed to explore the connectedness of South African adolescents and identify significant dependencies thereof with type of school and age (grade level). To this end, 486 Grade 8 and 330 Grade 11 students enrolled at four diverse schools completed the Hemingway Measure of Adolescent Connectedness (MAC) questionnaire. The questionnaire gauged student connectedness on 15 subscales. The students were best connected to the future, religion and themselves in the present. Regarding family, in rank order they were connected to their mothers, their siblings and lastly to their fathers. They were least connected to reading, their neighbourhoods and to romantic partners. Statistically significant differences were found between the connectedness of the students of the four schools, and of the two grade levels. In general, the students of school A, which served a high socioeconomic area, were best connected. The Grade 8 students were also better connected than the Grade 11 students on several of the subscales. Some recommendations for improving adolescent connectedness and for future research were made.
Iranian Evolutionary Educational Psychology Journal, 2021
The aim of this study was to compare the sense of belonging, adjustment and academic buoyancy in Iranian and Afghan students in elementary schools. The present study is a causal-comparative study. The statistical population was all Iranian and Afghan primary school students who were studying in one of the primary schools in the 11th district of Shiraz, Iran in the 2020 academic year. The sample consisted of 60 Afghan and Iranian male and female students who were selected by random sampling method. To collect data, Hossein Chari and Dehghanizadeh Academic Buoyancy Scale, Brew et al. students’ sense of connectedness with school scale and the Student Adjustment Scale were used. Research hypotheses were tested using univariate and multivariate analysis of variance to compare sense of connectedness with school, adjustment and academic buoyancy in Iranian and Afghan elementary students. Findings indicated that the scores of sense of connectedness with school, the adjustment (general adjustment, emotional adjustment, social adjustment and academic adjustment) and the feeling of buoyancy in Iranian students are higher than Afghan students. Cultural differences and immigration of Afghan students may be the possible explanations of the findings.