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Social and Emotional Learning in Australia and the Asia-Pacific pp 83–99Cite as

School Belonging and the Role of Social and Emotional Competencies in Fostering an Adolescent’s Sense of Connectedness to Their School

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Abstract

The literature on school belonging is not well advanced in Australia and is complicated by a disparity in terminology (e.g., school belonging has been referred to as school connectedness, school bonding, affiliation with school, school community). Nevertheless, there is a common understanding that school belonging is vital and necessary for the social and emotional well-being of adolescence. This chapter will present a general overview of school belonging and associated empirical studies, present findings of a meta-analysis that has investigated the relationship between social and emotional competencies and school belonging, and discuss practical implications for how to increase social and emotional competencies that may in turn enhance school belonging. The field of research concerned with school belonging and social and emotional competencies holds promise for future directions with respect to the applied impact in schools.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Various terms are used to describe school belonging in the literature (e.g., school bonding, engagement, attachment, community, and connectedness) these terms tend to share three similar operational aspects (1) school-based relationships and experiences, (2) student-teacher relationships, (3) and students’ general feelings about school as a whole (Goodenow and Grady 1993). This chapter will use the term school belonging and will only apply findings from other studies using alternative terminology (e.g., school connectedness, school bonding) if it is consistent with Goodenow and Grady’s definition of school belonging given how broadly accepted and applied this definition is within the literature (Anderman 2002; Knifsend and Graham 2012; Ma 2003; Nichols 2006).

  2. 2.

    A meta-analysis provides a quantitative way to reduce the findings of multiple studies to a common metric, and then to relate this common value to independent variables of a study (Hattie and Hansford 1984).

  3. 3.

    The medium and large effect sizes were used as determined by Cohen (1988), that is, r effects = small ≥0.10, medium ≥0.30, large ≥0.50.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Toorak College Mount Eliza, Melbourne, Australia

    Kelly Allen

  2. The Melbourne Graduate School of Education, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

    Kelly Allen, Dianne Vella-Brodrick & Lea Waters

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  1. Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne, University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

    Erica Frydenberg

  2. University of New South Wales, School of Education, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

    Andrew J. Martin

  3. School of Education, University of New South Wales School of Education, Sydney, Australia

    Rebecca J. Collie

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Allen, K., Vella-Brodrick, D., Waters, L. (2017). School Belonging and the Role of Social and Emotional Competencies in Fostering an Adolescent’s Sense of Connectedness to Their School. In: Frydenberg, E., Martin, A., Collie, R. (eds) Social and Emotional Learning in Australia and the Asia-Pacific. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-3394-0_5

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