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Belongingness

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Developing psychological (belonging) interventions to improve engagement, attendance and educational outcomes

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Trainer: Graeme Blench

Learning Influencer Training Slides

The FE Catalyst project is funded by the Department for Education.

Developing psychological (belonging) interventions to improve engagement, attendance and educational outcomes

What are the research findings and how can we use them practically in order to improve student attendance and engagement?

When confronting problems in education,

• We tend to focus on what and how teachers teach, a teacher centric model

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• How might a student-centric model offer any insights?

Objectives of the training:

1. Introduce the empirical research linking social belonging to educational outcomes
2. Explore the consequences to young adults of not belonging
3. Share practical, evidence-based interventions that promote belonging and have an impact upon outcomes

Pre-session task, (after Heider and Simmel, 1944). ‘With belonging in mind, tell the story of what happened in the film.’

What does the research tell us about students’ sense of belonging, engagement with learning and educational outcomes?

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• Students with a strong sense of belonging display higher academic motivation, self-esteem and achievement, (Goodenow and Grady, 1993; OECD, 2013; Sirin and Rogers-Sirin, 2004; Wang and Holcombe, 2010)
• They are less likely to display risky or antisocial behaviour, (Catalano et al., 2004)
• They are less likely to truant and drop out of school are more likely to be remain on programme, (Lee and Burkam, 2003; McWhirter, Garcia and Bines, 2018; Slaten et al., 2015)
• They are also more likely to be satisfied with their lives in a more general sense, (OECD, 2017)

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How does a sense of belonging affect educational attainment?

Engagement is directly related to motivation and motivation is directly related to a strong sense of purposefulness, belonging and trust with positive physical and psychological consequences.

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Adam Lanza (Sandy Hook Elementary, 27 dead)

Seung-Hui Cho(Virginia Tech, 32 dead)

Dylan Klebold, Eric Harris (Columbine, 19 dead)

Dimitrios Paugourtziz, (Sante Fe, 10 dead)

Nikolas Cruz (Stoneham High, 17 dead)

What is ‘belonging’?

What is ‘belonging’?

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Feelings of being an accepted, valued and legitimate member of a group, based upon trust, acceptance and support, (Baumeister and Leary, 1995)

Why does it matter?

• Humans are social animals, therefore belonging is a fundamental need, (Maslow, 1943)
• We constantly monitor our belonging status, especially in new or unfamiliar contexts
• We are consciously and sub-consciously sensitive to threats to our sense of belonging
• Under some circumstances, we chronically misinterpret signals and, with confirmation bias, we exacerbate our feeling of not-belonging
• Education is a social process and knowledge is socially constructed
• Belonging gaps reinforce achievement gaps

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Why does it matter?: What is the current state of loneliness in children and young people?�

• As the first lockdown was progressing in April/May 2020, 35% of young people said they feel lonely often or most of the time despite spending three hours on social media . (Young Minds, 2020)
• As the first lockdown was progressing in April/May 2020, 35% of young people said they feel lonely often or most of the time despite spending three hours on social media (Oxford ARC, 2020)
• In a YouGov poll responded to around the same time, 69% of adolescents aged 13-19 said they felt alone “often” or “sometimes” in the last fortnight and 59% feel they have no one to talk to “often” or “sometimes”, (Mental Health Foundation, 2020)

But the pandemic is not the sole cause…

• Nearly nine in ten (88%) Britons aged from 18 to 24 said they experience loneliness to some degree with a quarter (24%) suffering often and 7% saying they are lonely all of the time.
• In comparison, 70% of those aged over 55 also say they can be lonely to some extent, however, only 7% are lonely often and just 2% say they are lonely all the time

(Ibbetson, 2019)

• 40% of respondents aged 16-24 reported feeling lonely often or very often, while only 29% of people aged 65-74 and 27% of people aged over 75 said the same, (BBC, 2018)

Why does it matter? ��Exclusion is painful and carries negative physical and psychological consequences: �

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Williams, Nida & Williams, 2011

Kelly and Bowles, 2012

Belonging

Barriers to engagement (‘We belong in school’, Davidson et al., 2016)

• Social anxiety/ imposter syndrome

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• Fear of failure (may be related to previous educational experience)

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• Lack of (perceived) relevance/ sense of purposelessness in sessions (Lady MacBeth, victim or perpetrator?)

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• Self-sabotaging internal beliefs about their ‘talent’

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• Mental ill-health

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• Lack of a strong sense of belonging (to the class/group/college)

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• The student’s social/familial context

The potential equation of a failing student

↓in belonging= ↓in engagement

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↓in engagement= ↓ punctuality

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↓in engagement + ↓ punctuality= ↓attendance

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↓in engagement + ↓ punctuality + ↓attendance= ↓progress

↓in progress= ↓engagement…. etc.

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Do I belong here?

Not sure….

More vigilant

Do I belong here?

Not sure….

Even more vigilant

Friend doesn’t say, ‘Hi’

Bad test outcome

Tutor cancels meeting/seems ‘off’

Assume the worst

Do I belong here?

Yes!

Less vigilant

Friend doesn’t say, ‘Hi’

Bad test outcome

Tutor cancels meeting/seems ‘off’

Benefit of the doubt

Some students develop self limiting beliefs;

• Struggling maths students think they are stupid (especially if everyone else appears to be coping)
• Minority students in heavily genderised subjects may doubt their ‘belongingness’
• Some students may feel others are judging them stereotypically, rather than on their own merits

If we are trying to foster a sense of belonging, how well do you know your students?��

A student view…�

• How does your classroom look to the student in the fourth row at the back?

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• What are they concerned about?

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• What is her/his belief about her/his potential?

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• Does that student feel accepted by their peer group, by you?

The rise and rise of ProMonitor

Let’s try an experiment in trust and secrecy

One day, third-grade teacher Kyle Schwartz asked her students to fill-in-the-blank in this sentence: I wish my teacher knew _____." The results astounded her

How might that activity feel….

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‘ What my manager should know about me’

Take a X-ray of the class

• Every Friday afternoon this teacher asks her students to take out a piece of paper and write down the names of four students with whom they’d like to sit the following week. The students know that these requests may or may not be honoured. She also asks the students to nominate one student who they believe has been an exceptional classroom citizen that week. All ballots are privately submitted to her.
• Every single Friday afternoon, after the students go home, this teacher takes out those slips of paper, places them in front of her and studies them. She looks for patterns.
• Who is not getting requested by anyone else?
• Who doesn’t even know who to request?
• Who never gets noticed enough to be nominated?
• Who had a million friends last week and none this week?

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Developing belonging interventions

Post card reflection task

• Think back to a time when you were a ‘newbie’, perhaps on a new course, at a conference , first day of a new job, etc.

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• How were you made to feel welcomed and a develop a sense of belonging? Did it matter?

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• 100 words, maximum be prepared to share and discuss.

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1. Greet them at the door

Teacher greetings produced increases in students' on-task behaviour from a mean of 45% in baseline to a mean of 72%. Teacher greetings represent an antecedent manipulation that can easily be implemented in classrooms to improve students' on-task behaviour.

Students got on-task significantly faster when greeted.

(Allday and Pakurar, 2007, 2011)

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Results revealed that the Positive Greeting at the Door (PGD) strategy produced significant improvements in academic engaged time and reductions in disruptive behaviour. Moreover, results from a social validity questionnaire indicated that teachers found the PGD strategy to be feasible, reasonable, and acceptable.

(Cook, Fiat and Larson, 2018)

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....and here is a pretty groovy way to do it! �

2. Students explicitly identify the relevance of what they’ve learned�

Original study: Each month, students wrote a brief essay describing how the material they had studied in science could be applied in their lives, answering the following question “Apply this topic/concept to your life, or to the life of someone you know. How might the information be useful to you, or a friend/relative, in daily life? How does learning about this topic apply to your future plans?”  At the end of the semester, students who expected to perform poorly in science had earned higher grades; no effects were found among those with high expectations for success in science

(Hulleman and Harackiewicz, 2009).

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3. Students persuade their juniors they can succeed�

Original study: Participants read about how new students often feel they do not belong in college, but that their worries dissipate in time; they then wrote an essay and gave a speech ostensibly to the next year’s new intake about how their worries had changed over time.  Relative to multiple control groups, black students in the treatment group earned higher Grade Point Averages throughout college, reducing the racial achievement gap by 52%, were more likely to be in the top quartile, and three years post-treatment reported being happier and healthier.  

(Walton and Cohen 2007, 2011)

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4. Students’ values are affirmed�

Original study: At the beginning of the school year, students wrote about values that were important to them as an in-class writing exercise.  The value-affirmation increased black students’ grades, reducing the gap between black and white students’ grades by 40%; the treatment raised low-attaining black students’ Grade Point Average two years after the treatment.

(Cohen et al., 2006)

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5. The work of Yeager, Walton and Cohen, 2011, 2012

• The intervention provided students with a narrative that framed social adversity in school as shared and short-lived.
• This message encouraged students to attribute adversity not to fixed deficits unique to themselves or their ethnic group but to common and transient aspects of the college-adjustment process.
• Upon arrival in a research lab, participants read a report of the ostensible results of a survey of more senior students at their school. Most students, the report indicated, had worried about whether they belonged in college during the difficult first year but grew confident in their belonging with time. The survey results were said to be consistent across ethnic and gender groups.

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• Concerns about belonging were thus represented as common at first, as temporary, and as due to the challenging nature of the college transition

• To encourage participants to internalize the message, several steps exploited the “saying is-believing effect”—the tendency to endorse messages that one has freely advocated
• Participants were asked to write an essay describing how their own experiences in college echoed the experiences summarized in the survey

The impact of Yeager, Walton and Cohen’s intervention (2011, 2012)

6. Develop a Growth Mindset (Dweck 2006)

This approach now needs nuancing;

• Teach students that ability is closely linked with effort, but that this is necessary but not sufficient

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Success= effort + strategies + help from others

7. Develop individual and classroom values

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• Utilise in-class ‘fast writing’ techniques to articulate values coinciding with stressors throughout the year
• Values affirmation in which the students self-generate sets of values demonstrate a significant impact upon GPA, self-efficacy and happiness, (Cohen et al, 2017)

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8. Develop a wise feedback strategy

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• Yeager and colleagues recruited African-American and European-American seventh-graders who were earning Bs and Cs.
• They first asked the students to write an essay about their personal hero, and then asked the students’ teachers to comment on and grade the essays.
• Before the teachers returned the essays, the researchers randomly assigned the students to receive one of two notes clipped to the paper and allegedly from the teacher

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Before returning the papers, they were randomly assigned to two groups:

Standard condition

“I’m giving you these comments so that you’ll have feedback on your paper.”

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27% of the African-American students revised their essays

Wise criticism condition

“I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them.”

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67% of the African-American students revised their essays

9. Reconsider induction programmes

• Extend the duration, say 2 weeks instead of 1
• Design the induction to focus on PBL, in groups, producing an artefact
• Mastery learning increases retention and reduces attrition

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In conclusion and words of caution

• Brief psychological interventions have repeatedly demonstrated impact
• Most (all?) require very little preparation by the teacher
• The interventions shared today do not replace good teaching, they complement it
• The interventions are predicated upon the teacher’s empathic understanding of their students emotional life
• All interventions must be delivered in a ‘psychologically wise’ way, being authentic (Yeager, et al, 2013)….

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References

1. Baumeister, R. and M. Leary (1995), “The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation”, Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 117/3, pp. 497-529, http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.117.3.497.
2. BBC. (2018) 16-24 year olds are the loneliest age group according to new BBC Radio 4 survey. https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/latestnews/2018/loneliest-age-group-ra....
3. Catalano, R. et al. (2004), “The importance of bonding to school for healthy development: Findings from the social development research group”, Journal of School Health, Vol. 74/7, pp. 252-261, http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1746-1561.2004.tb08281.x.
4. Davidson, S. et al (2016) ‘We belong in school’. Presentation given to REL Northwest, https://educationnorthwest.org/sites/default/files/events/resources/we-belong-in-school-webinar-slides.pdf
5. Goodenow, C. and K. Grady (1993), “The relationship of school belonging and friends’ values to academic motivation among urban adolescent students”, The Journal of Experimental Education, Vol. 62/1, pp. 60-71, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00220973.1993.9943831.
6. Heider, F., & Simmel, M. (1944). An experimental study of apparent behavior. The American journal of psychology, 57(2), 243-259. An Experimental Study of Apparent Behavior (jstor.org)
7. Ibbetson, C. (2019) Young Britons are the most lonely. https://yougov.co.uk/topics/relationships/articles-reports/2019/10/03/yo....
8. Lee, V. and D. Burkam (2003), “Dropping out of high school: The role of school organization and structure”, American Educational Research Journal, Vol. 40/2, pp. 353-393, http://dx.doi.org/10.3102/00028312040002353.
9. Maslow, A. (1943), “A theory of human motivation”, Psychological Review, Vol. 50, pp. 370-396.
10. Mental Health Foundation, (2020) Loneliness during Corona-virus. https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/coronavirus/loneliness-during-coronavirus 
11. McWhirter, E., E. Garcia and D. Bines (2018), “Discrimination and other education barriers, school connectedness, and thoughts of dropping out among Latina/o students”, Journal of Career Development, Vol. 45/4, pp. 330-344, http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0894845317696807.
12. OECD (2017), PISA 2015 Results (Volume III): Students’ Well-Being, PISA, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264273856-en.
13. OECD (2013), PISA 2012 Results: Ready to Learn (Volume III): Students’ Engagement, Drive and Self-Beliefs, PISA, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264201170-en.
14. Oxford ARC Study., (2020) Achieving resilience during COVID-19 weekly report 2.. https://oxfordarcstudy.com/2020/05/20/weekly-report-2/.
15. Sirin, S. and L. Rogers-Sirin (2004), “Exploring school engagement of middle-class African American adolescents”, Youth & Society, Vol. 35/3, pp. 323-340, http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0044118X03255006.
16. Slaten, C. et al. (2015), “Hearing the voices of youth at risk for academic failure: What professional school counselors need to know”, The Journal of Humanistic Counseling, Vol. 54/3, pp. 203-220, http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/johc.12012.
17. Williams, K. D., & Nida, S. A. (2011). Ostracism: Consequences and coping. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 20(2), 71-75. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0963721411402480
18. Wang, M. and R. Holcombe (2010), “Adolescents’ perceptions of school environment, engagement, and academic achievement in middle school”, American Educational Research Journal, Vol. 47/3, pp. 633-662, http://dx.doi.org/10.3102/0002831209361209.
19. Yeager, D. S., et al, (2014). Breaking the Cycle of Mistrust: Wise Interventions to Provide Critical Feedback Across the Racial Divide. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143, 804-824.
20. Young Minds. (2020) Coronavirus report March. https://youngminds.org.uk/media/3708/coronavirus-report_march2020.pdf.

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