A Game Plan for Building Belonging through Student Involvement

Student involvement is consequential - students who lack extracurricular involvements are 57% more likely to drop out, have a 0.88 lower GPA, and engage in more at-risk behaviors than their more involved peers (citation).

The sense that students know someone cares if they come to school is known as “school connectedness”.  When schools actively track which students are (and are not) involved on campus, they are missing an early indicator as to which students feel disconnected from their school. 

Here is your 3-step game plan to start tracking student involvement:

• STEP 1:  Download this free spreadsheet (file here, demo here) to scan student IDs for any type of involvement - club meetings, tutoring sessions, drama performances, or basketball games.  

• STEP 2:  Decide which scanner(s) you would like, based on wired vs bluetooth, 1D (barcode) vs 2D (QR code), and other features as desired.  Here is how the handheld scanners work.   Two that I recommend are here and here.   

• STEP 3:  Decide what you want to do with the data you collect, such as to identify the most and least involved students, or to generate involvement reports for SST or IEP meetings.  For two data analysis options, consider this Spreadsheet Homeroom tutorial on how to list present and absent students, or this Spreadsheet Homeroom tutorial on how to filter and sort students based on criteria you provide.  

When you are ready to implement a comprehensive student involvement program, consider our more robust Student Involvement application.  Beyond basic attendance, this application eases data collection for rostered teams, assigns and tracks points for different types of involvements, and includes a staff mentoring program where students check in periodically with a staff mentor to share upcoming opportunities for involvement that align with the student’s interests, and who receives email reports about that student’s involvements at campus events each week.  

Student involvement data is underutilized as a measure of students’ connectedness to their school.  Leveraging that data can help schools invest in human relationships to promote belonging among students who need that support the most.