How School Racial Climate Creates Opportunity Structures for Belonging: A Systematic Review with Meta Analysis

Belonging, a fundamental human need, plays a crucial role in educational settings, profoundly affecting students’ engagement, motivation, and overall well-being (Walton & Brady, 2017). K-12 schools and colleges have the responsibility to promote interpersonal, instructional, and institutional opportunities to support sense of belonging, especially for marginalized students (Gray et al., 2018). School racial climate refers to perceptions of values, norms, interactions, and relationships relating to race, ethnicity, and culture within a school. In this project, we describe how school racial climate creates opportunity structures for belonging and then empirically demonstrate the relationship between various domains of racial climate and sense of belonging through a meta-analysis of 79 studies and 304 effect sizes.