Building and Sustaining a Sense of Belonging During the Transition to High School - An Exploratory Study of Youth and Parent Perspectives

Oct 15, 2026

September 2025 study examining how youth belonging is built and sustained during the move from middle school to high school, incorporating youth and parent perspectives. The analysis argues that belonging is a fundamental human need tied to wellbeing, engagement, attendance, and academic achievement, while uncertainty can heighten stressors such as stereotype threat. It critiques survey-centric approaches that treat belonging as an individual trait and overlook organizational conditions and contextual change across school settings, especially for minoritized students.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages20

Reading Time50 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Project Background

September 2025 Building and Sustaining a Sense of Belonging During the Transition to High School An Exploratory Study of Youth and Parent Perspectives Sebastian Castrechini Ella Johnson Gray Kristin Geiser Introduction Belonging—the sense of being an accepted and valued member of a community—is a fundamental human need ( Baumeister & Leary, 1995) and a key component of positive youth development ( Lerner et al., 2009) . Research shows that a strong sense of belonging is critical to students’ wellbeing and engagement at school (Walton & Brady, 2018) . When students feel that they belong, they are more motivated to engage in their school work ( Neel & Fuligni, 2013) and tend to have better attendance and academic achievement (Osterman, 2000; Sá nchez et al., 2005) . Conversely, when students are uncertain about their belonging, they are more vulnerable to a variety of stressors, including stereotype threat, which can reduce their ability to learn (Cohen & Garcia, 2008) . Alongside former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s call to recognize the national crisis of loneliness and isolation ( Department of Health and Human Services, 2023), many schools and districts are paying greater attention to their role in fostering students’ sense of belonging. This focus often includes eﬀorts to measure students’ sense of belonging, typically by administering annual surveys and sharing results publicly. Such eﬀorts raise awareness of the importance of belonging, but gaps remain in how educators, researchers, and policymakers understand, measure, and improve students’ experiences of belonging. One key challenge has been the tendency to conceptualize and measure belonging as an individual asset and not examine the organizational factors that foster or limit students’ sense of belonging. While an individual focus oﬀers insight into the status of youth belonging at a particular point in time, SENSE OF BELONGING ACROSS THE TRANSITION TO HIGH SCHOOL 2 it diverts attention away from the relationship between a student’s sense of belonging and their environment. Years of research, particularly in schools that serve diverse student populations, have shown that school policies and practices structure student experiences in ways that stratify students’opportunities for belonging (Gray et al., 2018) . For example, when the designation of students into special education (Saatcioglu & Sk rtic, 2019) or diﬀerent curriculum tracks (Oakes, 2005) correlates highly with student race and/or ethnicity, then school policies and practices are contributing to diﬀerentiated opportunities for belonging. Framing belonging as an individual trait overlooks the critical role schools play in shaping the conditions that foster a sense of belonging and, further, how those conditions are (and are not) equitably aﬀorded to students across identity groups. The challenge of creating organizational support for students’ sense of belonging is amplified during school transition points, when students move from one school to another and/or one district to another as part of their progression through grades K–12 . Such transitions can be particularly diﬀicult for minoritized students, especially if they move from smaller, more segregated schools where they may be in the racial majority into larger, more diverse schools where they feel more isolated ( Morales-Chicas & Graham, 2017) . Interestingly, research suggests that bolstering students’ sense of belonging during this transition could buﬀer against declines in attendance and achievement for minoritized youth ( Faircloth & Hamm, 2005) . It follows, then, that in order to develop and implement organizational mechanisms that improve students’ sense of belonging during the transition from middle school to highschool, we need robust strategies for understanding how students experience belonging and the contexts that shape those experiences. This leads to another challenge: Framing belonging as an individual trait over

FAQs

Why is students’ sense of belonging important during the school transition to high school?

The document links belonging to wellbeing, motivation, attendance, and academic achievement, and notes that uncertainty about belonging can increase vulnerability to stressors that reduce learning.

What does the document identify as a key limitation of current belonging measurement?

It argues that commonly used survey measures treat belonging as a whole-school status, decontextualize youths’ experiences, and often cannot track changes over time or across different settings within schools.

How do organizational factors and school policies shape belonging?

The text emphasizes that school policies and practices structure student opportunities for belonging, and that framing belonging solely as an individual trait misses how conditions are created and distributed equitably across identity groups.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Maya Linwood