Abstract
School belonging is of great significance to students' physical and mental health development, especially academic improvement. However, the mechanism of the influence of school belonging on student academic achievement should be further explored, especially reading performance. Based on ecological systems theory and self-determination theory, the present research constructs a multilevel design to examine a moderated mediation model in which school belonging as a level-1 predictor, mastery goal orientation as a level-1 mediator and school disciplinary climate as a level-2 moderator jointly impact reading literacy. Results of the study were based on the questionnaires from 11,364 (5,455 girls and 5,909 boys) 15-year-olds nested in 332 schools in mainland China that participated in PISA 2018. The cross-sectional analysis indicated that: (1) school belonging had a direct and positive effect on student reading literacy; (2) the relationship between school belonging and reading literacy was prominently mediated by mastery goal orientation; (3) both school disciplinary climate level and strength could negatively moderate the latter half path of “school belonging → mastery goal orientation → reading literacy.” Implications, limitations, and future research directions are discussed.
Highlights
Academic achievement is an important indicator to evaluate student learning status and the quality of school education
Most existing studies focused on the impact of school belonging on academic achievement that represented a combination of several subjects (Okilwa, 2016; Abdollahi and Noltemeyer, 2018; Dixson, 2020; Li et al, 2020), such as the combination of mathematics, reading, and science (Li et al, 2020) or the combination of mathematics and reading (Okilwa, 2016)
We use 14 response items measuring the three constructs to test the CFA in Mplus 8.0 to merge the variables gradually and examine changes in fitting degrees to test the discriminant validity of the model
Summary
Academic achievement is an important indicator to evaluate student learning status and the quality of school education. One reason is that reading literacy is a foundation for achievement in other subject areas within the educational system and a prerequisite for successful participation in most areas of adult life (OECD, 2019; Koyuncu and Firat, 2020) Another is that reading is considered to be a learning experience, which is infused with more emotions compared with other subjects. The first purpose of this study is to identify the effect of school belonging on student reading performance with a large-scale survey
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