School belonging, at both a school and university level, has been well documented as a predictor of academic and psychosocial success. The construct has been examined by scholars in a variety of different professional disciplines (e.g., education, psychology, sociology) and continues to be consistently researched. Although significant contributions have been made in the field, there are still additional areas of investigation needed, as well as interventions that need to be designed and explored. The current article was designed to review the theoretical foundations of belonging, conceptualise school belonging with respect to how it is presented in the literature, discuss the key variables related to school belonging, present a summary of the predictors of school belonging, discuss school belonging in a university setting, and posit future directions for research.

The examination of belonging in schools, connecting school belonging to a plethora of academic and psychosocial outcomes, has been well established in the literature. Researchers have measured school belonging most frequently with the Psychological Sense of School Membership, but its psychometric properties have been called into question by several researchers. Further, the scale measures 1 subset of belonging (i.e., school), leaving out powerful belonging connections in other areas of a student's life, namely peers and family. The current study examines the development and validation of the Milwaukee Youth Belongingness Scale. This process was examined by utilizing item response theory and a secondary analysis confirming the factor structure and the validation of the scale by comparing it to other constructs. The results confirm a 9-item scale that involves a total scale score and 3 factors (School, Peers, Family). Implications for mental health professionals and future research are discussed. Impact and ImplicationsThe current study establishes a strong measurement tool to evaluate youth's sense of belonging in crucial areas of their life (family, peers, school). This tool will allow school mental health and educational professionals an opportunity to identify students who may find themselves on the margins and isolated feel connected in and outside of the school community. Further, the measurement tool can aid educational administrators in gaining a greater understanding of their school climate.

College athletes across north America are often known on their respective college campuses for their athleticism, and spend a considerable amount of hours weekly engaging in their respective sport through practices, meetings, travelling and meals, to name a few. It is no wonder it is difficult for these students to feel fully engaged and connected on university campuses as students. Female college athletes in particular, who often are not athletes in revenue-generating sports, often feel left behind as students and isolated as athletes. The purpose of the current study was to examine female collegiate athletes’ experience with belonging in a university setting. This qualitative inquiry utilised consensual qualitative research to explore 14 female student athletes’ experience of belonging on a university campus. The results of the data analysis yielded the following domains or themes: athletic team culture, athletic department culture, campus support and involvement, female athlete identity, and individual athlete experience. The most salient finding was that these female athletes suggested that their sense of belonging on campus was almost exclusively related to their experience as an athlete and their athletic team.

Between the years of 2003–2015, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has identified a global trend signalling a decline in a sense of school belonging for secondary school students. Research has identified several factors that are positively related to school belonging, such as teacher support and academic motivation. However, little empirical research has been conducted to evaluate the relevant school belonging variables holistically and to assess their socio-ecological levels (e.g., student, microsystem, mesosystem) relative to the student. The purpose of this study is to assess the significant predictive variables within each socio-ecological level regarding school belonging. For this purpose, this study used data collected by PISA in 2015, focusing on data from 309,785 15-year-old students attending 12,668 schools in 52 countries around the world. Hierarchical multiple regression analysis was conducted to a) examine the empirical support for a layered structure of sense of school belonging, b) explore the contributions of variables in each layer of the socio-ecosystem to explain the variability in sense of school belonging and c) examine potential variations in this ability across schools and countries. The models provided support for the existence of such layers but also for some underlying relationships across the variables in the layers of the socio-ecosystem. The study then concludes with a discussion of the implications of the findings for school leaders, teachers and parents with respect to how school belonging approaches and strategies can be absorbed into existing practices and operations at school.