What Are We Doing Here?
Evaluating Student Belonging in School Environments
Designers strive to create school environments that perform for the communities they serve, but the education design industry has struggled to agree on what “perform” actually means. Do we want students to like their school? Probably, but that only scratches the surface. How should students feel at school? Creative, inspired, connected… The staggering breadth of possible answers to what a school should do has left the design community with the opposite problem: far too little research is being done on educational impacts from school design because we have no consensus on how that research should be done. The Coalition for the Advanced Understanding of School Environments (CAUSE) is partnered with EDmarket to establish the fundamentals of how educational space designers should measure the impacts of their projects. Since our introduction in 2024, we have been developing a framework for the first CAUSE tools to be freely and publicly available for anyone and everyone to use.
The CAUSE survey tools include questions about the fundamental experience of students and teachers in the built environment. We ask about key environmental factors like lighting, acoustics, and safety. We also need to ask about important outcome factors that might be affected by the physical experience in learning spaces. These pieces fit together to create a functional picture of how a post-occupancy evaluation (POE) can see where environmental design translates to human outcomes.
These human outcomes include a select set of high-priority variables that have already been extensively researched in education and psychology, have established survey tools with validity and reliability studies already completed, and have been shown to have statistical connections to human health and student learning metrics. The student measures include three human outcome variables, the first of which is sense of belonging.
Sense of Belonging is a Key School Outcome for Students
Students attending school are trying to learn while navigating all the challenges of growing up; they are discovering their career interests, learning to build lasting friendships, and figuring out who they really are. Any school design that successfully supports learning must also provide opportunities for students to answer these questions about themselves at the same time – students must find a sense of belonging. Belonging is a fundamental human need. In fact, a synthesis of research has shown a lack of belonging has similar health consequences to smoking 15 cigarettes per day. According to the US Department of Education, many students have mental health challenges that impede their ability to learn. A recent study of over 21,000 high school students in the United States showed that 75% of student reported feelings at school were negative, with student word choice including alone, depressed, and bored. Designing for each student to develop a sense of belonging is one important part of promoting mental wellness in school.
Student belonging is also directly related to academic success. A meta-analysis of 82 empirical studies from the last 20 years found an overall positive correlation between academic achievement and sense of belonging. The relationship was even stronger between belonging and other motivation-based outcomes like a focus on learning to master a concept or skill (ie: mastery goal orientation) and self-efficacy. Despite its importance to student success, the international PISA project from OECD has found that, globally, student sense of belonging has been falling over the last 20 years. The United States has an even bigger problem with student belonging, with levels of belonging both far below global averages and falling faster than most other countries. The centrality of sense of belonging means design strategies that boost student sense of belonging have the opportunity to impact everything from learning to socio-emotional development to student engagement, persistence, and graduation.
A lack of belonging has health consequences comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
