Students’ and Student Teachers’ Sense of Belonging to Science: What Do We Know So Far?

Abstract

Forming a sense of belonging to others is a fundamental need of humans as social beings (Baumeister & Leary, 1995). Meeting this fundamental need crucially influences individuals’ intrinsic motivation (Ryan & Deci, 2000) and identity development (Wenger, 1999). Given this, a growing number of studies have investigated the extent to which university students’ success and wellbeing in science education is related to their sense of belonging to science. This research has brought greater clarity to university students’ development in science education; however, numerous aspects of university students’ sense of belonging to science remain understudied. In particular, there has been insufficient research on how sense of belonging to science might moderate or influence initial science teacher education. Therefore, this editorial aims to provide an overview of the major research findings that address students’ and student teachers’ sense of belonging to science and to inspire future research in science (teacher) education.

Exploring the validity of a single-item instrument for assessing pre-service primary school teachers’ sense of belonging to science

“…To evaluate the convergent validity of our developed instrument, we used the instrument developed by Feser (2020) as an alternative and multiple-item instrument for the assessment of pre-service primary school teachers' sense of belonging to science. This instrument is an evolved version of the instrument created by Good et al (2012) in the German language that has already been successfully validated for the assessment of preservice teachers' sense of belonging to science (for more details, see Feser, 2020). It consists of 21 items, which participants are asked to response to on a five-point Likert scale.…”

“…Simply put, sense of belonging to science is defined as individuals' feeling or sensation of social affiliation within the natural sciences (Kuchynka et al, 2019). More precisely, it refers to one's personal feelings of connectedness to, recognition and acknowledgement by, emotional wellbeing around, and interpersonal trust in people involved and engaged in the natural sciences (Feser, 2021).…”

“…Analogously, this applies to (science) teachers' interest in science and their sciencerelated self-concept. Not surprisingly, quantitative studies have found that these three constructs are substantially correlated, yet distinguishable from one another (e. g., Feser, 2020;Findley-Van Nostrand & Pollenz, 2017;Wang & Sneed, 2019). Beyond that, qualitative research has shown that the lack of a sense of belonging to science among preservice teachers goes hand in hand with stronger feelings of alienation and detachment regarding the natural sciences (Danielsson et al, 2016).…”

“…Unfortunately, existing instruments for assessing sense of belonging to science are predominantly designed in an ad hoc fashion (e.g., Rattan et al, 2018;Thoman et al, 2014), and only rarely has their validity been critically evaluated (e.g., Feser, 2020;Findley-Van Nostrand & Pollenz, 2017;Stachl & Baranger, 2020). Moreover, existing sense-of-belonging-to-science instruments require a comparatively long time on task on the part of participants because they consist of a significant number of items.…”

Pre-Service Primary School Teachers Interdisciplinary Competence and their Interest, Self-Concept, and Sense of Belonging Regarding Natural and Social Sciences: Findings from a Longitudinal Study in Germany

“…On one hand, within educational research, interest is usually conceptualized as the "specific and distinguished relationship between a person and […] concrete things, a topic, a subject-matter or an abstract idea" (Krapp & Prenzel, 2011, p. 31). On the other hand, academic self-concept refers to the cognitive representations of one's own abilities in academic performance situations (Gabriel-Busse et al, 2018;Dickhäuser et al, 2002;Shavelson et al, 1976), and sense of belonging to an academic domain is defined as individuals' feeling or sensation of connectedness and social affiliation with and within an academic domain (Feser, 2021;Pendergast et al, 2020). The domain-specific manifestations of these three constructs (i.e., teachers' interest, academic self-concept, and sense of belonging regarding natural sciences and, analogously, teachers' interest, academic self-concept, and sense of belonging regarding social sciences) are considered key features of teachers' domain-specific professional identity.…”