A Four-Question Test Could Reveal How Connected Teenagers Feel to School

A brief questionnaire designed to capture whether adolescents feel accepted, supported and safe at school has received a substantial psychometric overhaul. In a study of 621 Portuguese teenagers, researchers found that the widely used five-item School Connectedness Scale performed better after one question was removed, producing a four-item version with strong statistical properties and consistent performance across male and female students. The revised scale was also linked to higher quality of life, stronger mental well-being and a greater sense of social safety. The findings suggest that a carefully calibrated measure of school connectedness could give researchers and educators a faster way to identify how students experience their school environment—and how those experiences relate to mental health.

School connectedness is more than simply liking school or attending classes regularly. It refers to the degree to which students feel that they belong, are respected and supported, and have meaningful relationships within the school community. Adolescence is a period when social relationships become particularly important, as young people increasingly orient their attention toward peers and wider social groups. School is often the main setting where those relationships develop. When students feel integrated into that environment, previous research has associated connectedness with stronger engagement, better academic adjustment, greater life satisfaction and lower levels of risky behavior. Yet the scientific measurement of the concept remains complicated because terms such as belonging, attachment, bonding, engagement, school climate and teacher support are sometimes used interchangeably.

The new study, published in School Mental Health, focused on the five-item version of the School Connectedness Scale originally derived from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. The researchers recruited 621 adolescents aged 11 to 18 from public schools across northern, central and southern Portugal. The sample included 315 males and 306 females, with a mean age of 13.53 years, and most participants were enrolled in the seventh through ninth grades. Students completed anonymous online questionnaires during school hours, with the participation of researchers or clinical psychologists. Written consent was obtained from the adolescents and, where required, their parents or legal guardians.

The participants answered questions assessing school connectedness alongside measures of social safeness, positive mental health, anxiety, depression and quality of life. The connectedness scale uses a five-point response format, from strong disagreement to strong agreement, producing scores that indicate the strength of a student’s perceived relationship with school. The other instruments were also structured self-report measures. Positive mental health was assessed across emotional, social and psychological well-being; anxiety and depression scales measured symptom severity and interference with daily functioning; and the KIDSCREEN-10 assessed perceived health-related quality of life across family, peer and school settings. The researchers reported good internal reliability for these measures in their Portuguese adolescent sample.

To test whether the scale measured a single underlying construct, the team used confirmatory factor analysis, a statistical method that examines how well observed answers fit a proposed latent structure. In this case, the proposed structure was a single school-connectedness factor. The original five-item model did not fit the data well: its root mean square error of approximation, or RMSEA, was 0.089, above the level generally considered acceptable. Statistical modification indices suggested that some items shared unexplained variance, particularly questions about teacher fairness and school safety. Allowing certain residual errors to correlate improved the model, but one question continued to perform poorly.

That problematic question was “The teachers at this school treat students fairly.” Its factor loading—the strength of its relationship with the underlying connectedness factor—was below 0.50 in the full sample and in both sex groups. Its corrected item-total correlation was also the lowest, at 0.39, meaning that answers to the question were less closely aligned with students’ overall connectedness scores than were the other items. The researchers argue that the item may be measuring a different psychological target. The remaining questions focus on students’ own feelings, while the teacher-fairness question asks them to make a broader judgment about how teachers treat students collectively. It also shifts from a personal perspective, such as “I feel,” to an external evaluation of the school’s staff.

Removing the question produced a much stronger one-factor model. The revised four-item scale achieved an RMSEA of 0.046, and all remaining factor loadings exceeded 0.50. Internal consistency, assessed using both Cronbach’s alpha and McDonald’s omega, was generally between 0.80 and 0.85 across the full sample and the male and female subgroups. The researchers also tested measurement invariance, a crucial step when comparing groups. Configural invariance indicated that the same general factor structure applied to both groups; metric invariance showed that the items related to the factor in comparable ways; and scalar invariance indicated that score comparisons were meaningful because item intercepts were equivalent. In practical terms, the four-item scale appeared to measure the same construct in males and females.

The analysis nevertheless uncovered a difference in average connectedness scores. Male participants reported higher school connectedness than female participants, with mean scores of 15.46 and 14.49, respectively. The difference was statistically significant and had a small-to-medium effect size, with Cohen’s d equal to 0.32. The authors stress that research on sex differences in school connectedness has produced mixed findings, with some studies reporting higher connectedness among females, some finding no difference and others, particularly in certain cultural settings, observing higher scores among males. The result should therefore not be interpreted as a universal pattern. It may reflect differences in peer relationships, perceived school safety, teacher interactions or the social context of Portuguese public schools.

The strongest evidence for the revised scale came from its relationships with other aspects of adolescent well-being. Higher connectedness scores were associated with greater quality of life, positive mental health and social safeness—the perception that social environments are warm, reassuring and supportive. The largest simple correlation was with quality of life, at r = 0.553. Connectedness was also negatively correlated with anxiety and depressive symptoms, as expected. However, when the researchers entered all five outcomes into a multiple regression model, only quality of life, positive mental health and social safeness remained significant independent predictors of school connectedness. The model explained approximately 34.8 percent of the variance in connectedness, and quality of life showed the strongest unique association, with a standardized beta of 0.339.

That distinction matters because correlations do not establish direction or causation. A student who feels connected to school may experience greater well-being, but a student who already feels safe and satisfied with life may also be more likely to view school positively. The study’s cross-sectional design cannot determine whether school connectedness protects against poor mental health, whether mental health shapes perceptions of school, or whether both are influenced by other factors. The authors note that anxiety and depression were not significant independent predictors in the regression despite their negative correlations with connectedness. One possibility is that emotional symptoms and perceptions of school relationships operate through different pathways. Another is that the overlap among well-being measures altered the unique contribution of symptom scores when they were considered together.

The study has several additional limitations. All information came from adolescent self-reports, which can be influenced by memory, social desirability or a tendency to answer related questions in similar ways. The sample was drawn from public schools and included mainly students in grades seven through nine, so the results may not generalize to private schools, younger children, older adolescents or different educational systems. School-level characteristics—including size, culture, leadership and local norms—were not controlled for, even though they could affect students’ experiences. A ceiling effect was also observed for most of the connectedness items: more than 15 percent of participants selected the maximum response for several questions. Such clustering at the high end can make it harder for a scale to detect improvement among students who already report strong connectedness.

Despite those caveats, the revised measure could be useful in both research and practice because it reduces respondent burden while retaining strong reliability. A four-question tool can be incorporated into broader school surveys, repeated during intervention studies or used alongside mental-health screening without taking substantial classroom time. The shortened scale is focused specifically on students’ personal sense of belonging and connection to school. That focus is also its limitation. By removing the teacher-fairness question, the instrument no longer directly assesses whether students believe teachers treat them or other students fairly. The researchers recommend using an additional measure of student–teacher connectedness when that relationship is a central research or intervention target.

The findings point toward a broader shift in adolescent mental-health research: schools are increasingly being viewed not only as places where problems may be detected, but also as social environments capable of supporting well-being. Measuring whether students feel that they belong can help identify vulnerabilities that may be invisible in academic records or symptom checklists. The authors call for longitudinal studies involving multiple informants, including teachers and parents, as well as research in more diverse school settings and cultures. Future work should also test whether the four-item scale is sensitive to change after programs designed to improve school climate, peer relationships, mental well-being or quality of life. For now, the Portuguese validation provides evidence that a leaner measure can capture an important dimension of adolescent experience—while underscoring that connection to school and connection to teachers may not be exactly the same thing.