Community Resilience

A brief social-belonging intervention improves academic and health outcomes of minority students

This study explored interventions aimed at strengthening first-year college students’ sense of belonging in a randomized controlled trial. Academic and health-related consequences were reported over three years.

The intervention aimed to reduce students’ psychological perceptions of threat on campus by framing social adversity as common and short-lived.

It used subtle attitude-change strategies to lead participants to generate the intervention message on their own.

The intervention was expected to be particularly beneficial to African-American students, a stereotyped and socially marginalized group in academics, and less so to European-American students.

Consistent with these expectations, over the three-year observation period, the intervention raised African-American students’ GPA relative to multiple control groups and halved the minority achievement gap.

• Resilience within Indigenous communitiesJournal Article
• Research behind disparities in mental health and impacts on learningMultiple
• Universal Design for Learning: Theory and PracticeBook
• Students’ sense of campus community: What it means, and what to do about itJournal Article
• Constructing belonging in a diverse campus communityJournal Article
• Facilitating ‘Dialogues Across Difference’Book
• Why do women opt out? Sense of belonging and women’s representation in mathematicsJournal Article
• Sense of belonging and persistence in white and African-American first-year studentsJournal Article
• College students’ sense of belonging: Dimensions and correlatesJournal Article (PDF)
• Learning environment, interaction, sense of belonging and study success in ethnically diverse student groupsJournal Article
• A brief social-belonging intervention improves academic and health outcomes of minority studentsJournal Article
• Works citedWorks cited / Toolkit Post