Belongingness is one of the basic human needs. In a classroom environment, belongingness can be expressed as a sense of classroom belonging, which can be defined as the degree to which students feel the support, acceptance, respect, and inclusion from within their school’s social environment. While students can report on their own sense of belonging to their class, teachers can not do so for each student in their class. Teachers, on the other hand, can report on what the general classroom climate is like. This perceived classroom climate is strongly correlated with the students’ sense of belonging. Therefore, this research investigated which factors predict students’ sense of belonging to their classroom and which factors predict the classroom climate as perceived by the teachers. The analysis sample group consisted of 2183 4th and 5th grade students and 187 4th and 5th grade teachers. Both students and teachers filled out questionnaires. We measured the students’ sense of classroom belonging, perceived classroom climate, perceived closeness and support in the teacher-student relationship, personal resilience, and their experience of getting bullied or being the bully. The teachers’ collected data was used to measure the perceived classroom climate, perceived closeness, support and conflicts in the teacher-student relationship, competence to effectively deal with classroom bullying, relational competence, perceived frequency of bullying, and resilience. Multiple regression analysis was used to process and analyze the collected data. The predictors that appeared the most significant for students’ sense of belonging are their resilience, the perceived classroom climate, rare experiences of getting bullied, frequent bullying of others, and perceived closeness and support in the teacher-student relationship. The only two predictors that appeared significant for teachers’ perceived classroom climate are the rarely perceived bullying in the classroom, and perceived closeness and support in the teacher-student relationship. The results show that establishing a positive classroom atmosphere and strengthening the sense of class belonging require close and supportive teacher-student relationships and that students do not experience bullying. Following these findings, we prepared guidelines to help strengthen students’ sense of belonging to the class and develop a more positive classroom climate.
|
