Echoes of social experience: tracing the link between a sense of belonging in school physics classes and physics students’ persistence in higher education

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The present study investigates on an exploratory level the extent to which the sense of belonging that university physics students experienced in their physics classes in secondary school impacts their intention to drop out or alter their course of study in higher education. Analysing data collected between April and June 2022 among first-year physics students at 20 German universities (N = 263), we find a significant and negative effect on the part of participants’ (remembered) sense of belonging in school physics classes on their intention to drop out or change their studies. Parallel mediation analysis further reveals that this effect is fully mediated by students’ current sense of belonging to physics and their university. Notably, the indirect effect via participants’ current sense of belonging to physics is approximately four times as high as the indirect effect via university belonging. These results emphasise the importance of social embeddedness in early physics experiences on students’ academic development in higher education. Limitations of these results as well as implications regarding a potential improvement of persistence and satisfaction within physics-related higher-education programs are outlined at the end of this paper.