Does feeling like they belong actually help children learn more? What the research says, and what still excludes children in Indian classrooms

A single brief intervention at Stanford cut a minority achievement gap in half by changing how students interpreted social difficulty at school. Indian research on Dalit and Adivasi children’s everyday classroom experience documents exactly the kind of exclusion that intervention was designed to counter.

Sushmita Bose | Specialist in child development, wellbeing, and community engagement

In 2011, Stanford psychologists Gregory Walton and Geoffrey Cohen published a randomised controlled trial in Science testing something that sounds almost too small to matter: a roughly one-hour exercise given to college freshmen, built around reading survey results and older students’ stories showing that early doubts about belonging are common and fade with time. The effect wasn’t small. Tracked over three years, the intervention raised Black students’ GPA relative to multiple control groups and cut the achievement gap with white students in half. It had little measurable effect on white students, exactly as the researchers had predicted, because the mechanism it targeted, interpreting setbacks as evidence you don’t belong rather than as an ordinary part of a hard transition, disproportionately burdens students who already have reason to wonder whether they’re welcome.

Why did such a small intervention produce such a large effect?

Walton and Cohen’s earlier research, published in 2007, had already established the underlying pattern: when students from a stereotyped or marginalised group hit an ordinary social setback at school, a difficult class, an unreturned greeting, exclusion from a group project, they are statistically more likely than their peers to read it as proof they don’t belong, and that misreading itself predicts lower achievement and worse health outcomes over time. The 2011 intervention worked by interrupting exactly that interpretation, using students’ own words rather than a lecture from an authority figure, which is part of why such a brief exposure produced effects that lasted years rather than days.

Does this hold up outside college, in an ordinary school?

A version of the same intervention, tested with students moving from middle school into high school, produced 46 percent fewer unexcused absences and 36 percent fewer tardiness records over the following year.

A later randomised trial adapted the Walton and Cohen approach for the transition into high school rather than college, delivering it during an orientation programme to 162 incoming students, roughly a fifth from minoritised backgrounds. By the end of the first year, students who received the belonging materials had 46 percent fewer unexcused absences and 36 percent fewer tardiness records than the control group, and reported making more friends. These are the exact outcomes a headmaster already tracks on an attendance register, moved by an intervention that cost almost nothing and took under an hour to deliver.

What does exclusion actually look like in Indian classrooms?

Geetha Nambissan’s research on the schooling of Dalit children in India, dating back to 1996 and extended in a 2009 study for the Indian Institute of Dalit Studies and UNICEF, documented specific, concrete practices rather than a vague climate problem: children seated apart from their classmates, denied access to the same water supplies as other students, and excluded from school ceremonies and events. A 2013 study by Vimala Ramachandran and Taniya Naorem, published in the Economic and Political Weekly, examined what it actually means, day to day, to be a Dalit or tribal child in an Indian school, and found these patterns recurring across very different states and settings. None of this is the kind of dramatic incident that makes news. It is precisely the accumulation of small, repeated social signals, being seated apart, denied the same access as everyone else, left out of the group photo, that Walton and Cohen’s research says gets internalised by exactly the children least able to afford the cost.

What to do

Check, specifically, who in your classroom sits apart, is left out of school ceremonies, or is denied the same everyday access to facilities as everyone else, rather than assuming your classroom doesn’t have this problem because no one has complained.

Consider a simple belonging exercise near the start of a term or year, letting older or higher-performing students share, in their own words, that early struggles and setbacks are common and temporary rather than evidence a student doesn’t fit in, following the same mechanism the Stanford research actually used.

Track attendance and tardiness by the specific students you suspect may feel excluded, since this is precisely the measure the high-school belonging study moved, not a soft or unmeasurable outcome.

Don’t assume that a generically friendly classroom is the same thing as a targeted belonging intervention. The research shows the effect came from directly countering how marginalised students interpret setbacks, not from general warmth alone.

Read Nambissan’s or Ramachandran and Naorem’s actual documented findings on Dalit and Adivasi children’s classroom experience before concluding these patterns exist elsewhere and not in your own school.

Sources: Walton and Cohen, “A Brief Social-Belonging Intervention Improves Academic and Health Outcomes of Minority Students,” Science (2011) · Walton and Cohen, “A Question of Belonging: Race, Social Fit, and Achievement,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2007) · Randomised trial of a social-belonging intervention during the transition to high school · Nambissan, “Equity in Education? Schooling of Dalit Children in India” (1996) and “Exclusion and Discrimination in Schools: Experiences of Dalit Children,” Indian Institute of Dalit Studies and UNICEF (2009) · Ramachandran and Naorem, “What It Means to Be a Dalit or Tribal Child in Our Schools,” Economic and Political Weekly (2013)