This article was originally written by Scott Girard for The Cap Times.

New research from the Madison Education Partnership explores the relationship between middle school students’ sense of belonging in school and their sense of belonging in an individual classroom.

The paper, published last week through the Madison Education Partnership, used surveys in early 2020 to assess how students felt in their math classes and what teachers thought about their own efforts to help students feel like they belonged.

Key findings include that classroom and school belonging are distinct and that teachers with more confidence in their ability to teach math had a stronger sense of classroom belonging among their students. The research also found there was no systematic difference in math classroom belonging across racial/ethnic groups or by gender.

“I’m heartened to know that second finding, that teachers’ sense of their efficacy has an impact on kids,” said Madison Metropolitan School District executive director of research and innovation Beth Vaade. “That’s what we want, we want to know as educators that what we do in a classroom is going to be connected to what scholars feel.”

MEP, which is a partnership between the University of Wisconsin–Madison and MMSD, initially hoped to use observations and interviews with students and staff to complement the data from the surveys. But the COVID-19 pandemic prevented that extra step, something researcher and MEP co-director Eric Grodsky called “disappointing.”

“What we designed originally was to go into classrooms where teachers seem to be relatively more or less effective at creating a sense of classroom belonging and to watch and just see what teachers did,” Grodsky said. “We can’t really say, ‘Here’s what we saw in those classrooms,’ because we didn’t see it.”

MMSD has focused on the “sense of belonging” for years through its climate and culture surveys. Those surveys always ask about the school level, however, and the team designing this research wondered whether a student’s comfort — or lack thereof — in their entire school would be reflected in a classroom.

Specifically, they explored that feeling in middle school math classrooms. Grodsky said that decision came partly because of the “stereotype threat” surrounding the subject, with the assumption that women and students of color are worse at math creating a psychological threat as soon as they enter a classroom. MMSD STEM director Patti Schaefer said math was an “appealing” subject for this type of research.

“We see math as I’m either a math person or I’m not, a very split way of seeing ourselves in math,” Schaefer said.

To measure belonging, researchers surveyed 1,887 students and 60 teachers at five MMSD middle schools.

The student surveys measured school belonging, classroom belonging in math and English language arts classes, confidence as a learner and fixed versus growth mindset. The math teacher surveys measured school belonging, relational trust with colleagues and their principal, growth versus fixed mindset for students, beliefs about learning for diverse learners, confidence in skill as a math teacher and hypothetical responses to student behavior like failing to complete homework or poor performance on an assessment.

To build on this research, MEP hopes to analyze the associations between teacher practice, student classroom belonging and student learning; evaluate relationships between teachers’ beliefs about how student experiences of educational adversity shape their learning styles relate to student outcomes; and analyze how teachers may respond to different types of students when they do not turn in homework, score poorly on an exam or request additional accommodations.

Although the 18 months since the surveys were done have been the most tumultuous in recent history for students and teachers, researchers believe the findings are still relevant.

Grodsky said that in the “peculiar historical period” society is still in the middle of, it’s unclear how to apply the results in the short-term, but long-term he believes they’re certainly applicable.

“If you’re asking me, do these things apply in classrooms today? I’m not sure,” he said. “If you’re asking me, will they apply in classrooms in a year or two when we’re not masked and we’ve kind of got this under control? Yeah, I have no reason to think they wouldn’t.”

Schaefer said the district is already hoping to put the knowledge into action with a focus on professional learning among teachers in similar roles across different schools. That includes a partnership with UW–Madison Professional Learning’s Math Equity Project.

She said the pandemic might even “amplify that these things matter that much more.” Vaade is glad they measured it when they did, because reflecting on pre-pandemic times with the pandemic as a lens is different from capturing that “unique moment in time.”

“What we ended up capturing was this moment right before the world got shifted around on us,” she said. “For better or worse, it gives us a sense of where were we? That in and of itself is so unique to know.”

She said that it’s a good place to start from as schools consider how to go back to the good practices and change those that weren’t working.

“It’s a great way to kickstart that kind of conversation and give us a piece of information that we otherwise wouldn’t know in this way,” she said.