Tips for Teachers
School Bonding Boosts Academic Success
Do positive feelings about school mean improved performance? Research suggests a link exists. Whether the relationship is described as connectedness, attachment, or bonding, students who like their schools tend to show fewer behavioral problems and greater academic gains.
Influence of Risky Behaviors
Decades ago, health experts discovered a relationship between lower-fat diets and preventing heart disease. Social scientists have made similar discoveries regarding behavior. Researchers were surprised to learn that school connection or bonding wasn't only associated with academic achievement. It also factored in how likely students were to engage in risk-taking and other dangerous behaviors that can adversely affect their health.
Importance of School Connection
The Social Development Research Group in Seattle is responsible for some of the most significant long-term studies on this topic. Beginning with a group of elementary schools, researchers followed hundreds of students over more than a decade. In addition to improving teaching practices, they increased use of cooperative learning and taught kids social problem-solving skills. The study found higher academic achievement, lower delinquency rates, and decreased rates of health-compromising behaviors among children who described a strong sense of school connectedness.
Other factors that corresponded to school bonding included lower rates of misbehavior, grade repetition, dropping out of school, and criminal and gang activity during adolescence. Additionally, school bonding was associated with increased social skills and greater academic achievement. These effects extended to high-risk groups such as aggressive boys, children with parents who modeled problem behaviors, and low-income students.
How Do We Increase School Connection?
Other studies suggest it's possible to increase the sense of connectedness or bonding to school, and that strengthening this bond pays off over time.
Seattle's Social Development Group examined a prevention intervention carried out in elementary schools in high-risk neighborhoods. The program sought to enhance school bonding by improving teachers' classroom management and their ability to instruct in an engaging manner.
In first through sixth grade, school bonding and achievement increased and problem behaviors declined. As compared to students who weren't in the program, those who were had higher levels of school bonding throughout middle and high school. In their senior year, these students had higher academic achievement and engaged in fewer high-risk behaviors. Six and nine years after the intervention was completed, students who received the strategies showed higher levels of academic success and lower levels of risk-taking behavior.
Since many middle school students have not yet begun to experiment with risky behaviors, these years may present good opportunities to focus on fostering positive connections to school. Promoting students' feelings of connection or bonding with teachers may be particularly effective because research indicates positive relationships with teachers can counterbalance the negative influences of adolescent peers on risk-taking behaviors.
Where Do We Go from Here?
These studies provide evidence that bonding to school may play a strong role in a student's healthy development. In an era in which curricular content is increasingly narrowed to accentuate academic gains, a broader understanding of healthy school success is needed. This requires a focus on students' feelings of connection and on their social and emotional competence, as well as on their cognitive competence.
Increasing bonding to school by giving teachers the tools to actively engage students and students the social and emotional tools to participate and connect with others, is an important avenue for promoting the kinds of positive outcomes we desire for our children, and our society, over time.