What is the role of a school in its community? Designers strive to create school environments that perform for the communities they serve, but the education design industry has struggled to agree on what “perform” actually means. Do we want students to like their school? Probably, but that only scratches the surface of what great school design should be doing.
How should students feel at school? Creative, inspired, connected… The staggering breadth of possible answers to what a school should do has left the design community with the opposite problem: far too little research is being done on educational impacts from school design because we have no consensus on how that research should be done. The Coalition for the Advanced Understanding of School Environments (CAUSE) is partnered with EDmarket to establish the fundamentals of how educational space designers should measure the impacts of their projects. Since our introduction in 2024, we have been developing a framework for the first CAUSE tools to be freely and publicly available for anyone and everyone to use.
The CAUSE survey tools include questions about the fundamental experience of students and teachers in the built environment. We ask about key environmental factors like lighting, acoustics, and safety. We also need to ask about important outcome factors that might be affected by the physical experience in learning spaces. These pieces fit together to create a functional picture of how a post-occupancy evaluation (POE) can see where environmental design translates to human outcomes.
These human outcomes include a select set of high-priority variables that have already been extensively researched in education and psychology, have established survey tools with validity and reliability studies already completed, and have been shown to have statistical connections to human health and student learning metrics. The student measures include three human outcome variables, the first of which is sense of belonging.
What is a Sense of Belonging?
Students attending school are trying to learn while navigating all the challenges of growing up; they are discovering their career interests, learning to build lasting friendships, and figuring out who they really are. Any school design that successfully supports learning must also provide opportunities for students to answer these questions about themselves at the same time – students must find a sense of belonging. The CAUSE framework emphasized the place-based component of belonging as how much individuals feel a sense of social place within the built environment. It is one of six key components of belonging that are necessary to cultivate inclusive spaces for all students. Research has already shown that avoiding design stereotypes boosts student interest in school activities and their overall sense of belonging. Design elements like the role models we display, the cultural artifacts we embed, and even the interior design patterns like color and geometry. The research on design impacts to belonging is badly in need of expanded data collection. CAUSE is working to see sense of belonging included in more POEs so we can better understand how design elements impact belonging, which has a deep connection to many other student outcomes.
Sense of Belonging is a Key Outcome for Students
Belonging is a fundamental human need. In fact, a synthesis of research has shown a lack of belonging has similar health consequences to smoking 15 cigarettes per day. According to the US Department of Education, many students have mental health challenges that impede their ability to learn. A recent study of over 21,000 high school students in the United States showed that 75% of student reported feelings at school were negative, with student word choice including alone, depressed, and bored. Designing for each student to develop a sense of belonging is one important part of promoting mental wellness in school.
Student belonging is also directly related to academic success. A meta-analysis of 82 empirical studies from the last 20 years found an overall positive correlation between academic achievement and sense of belonging. The relationship was even stronger between belonging and other motivation-based outcomes like a focus on learning to master a concept or skill (ie: mastery goal orientation) and self-efficacy. Despite its importance to student success, the international PISA project from OECD has found that, globally, student sense of belonging has been falling over the last 20 years. The United States has an even bigger problem with student belonging, with levels of belonging both far below global averages and falling faster than most other countries. The centrality of sense of belonging means design strategies that boost student sense of belonging have the opportunity to impact everything from learning to socioemotional development to student engagement, persistence, and graduation.
We Have to Ask: Belonging for Whom and How?
School environments should cultivate a greater sense of belonging for more students. Students build a sense of belonging over time engaging in acts of belonging. That’s right – belonging is an action! It is something people do. Students find an opportunity to do belonging in collaborative spaces by either working together or finding an opportunity to co-exist quietly within the social spaces. Well-designed school environments can therefore cultivate a greater sense of belonging for more students by providing opportunities to engage in belonging at school. Everyone experiences school spaces differently, which means space evaluations must connect findings to students’ individual sense of belonging based on each person’s lived experience.
We must move beyond simple environmental satisfaction measures to get at how schools are meeting the needs of their communities.
While many existing school research projects (including the international PISA and some states, like Oregon) include student sense of belonging in their measurement approach, few design-based studies have included a linkage to student sense of belonging. Post occupancy researchers must link their findings on the physical environment to what students are experiencing related to their sense of belonging in that space. That means we must ask the questions together in the same study: “What do you experience in the space?” and “How much do you feel like you belong?” This is exactly what CAUSE is doing: developing a POE tool that design teams can use to study the impacts of their design for users.
Student sense of belonging is just one of multiple human outcome variables included in the CAUSE tool, and it is an outcome that everyone working on K-12 education projects should be considering when they evaluate project outcomes. We must move beyond simple environmental satisfaction measures to get at how schools are meeting the needs of their communities. Connecting POE research to the other most promising areas of on-going science is an essential first step, and including sense of belonging in the forthcoming CAUSE POE tools represents an opportunity for education space design researchers to take that step.