An Exploration of School Membership among Middle- and High-School Students

A personalized school environment is one of the guiding principles of many recent school reform plans. One useful model of school personalization, school membership, is proposed by Wehlage as part of his theory of drop-out prevention. Recently, Goodenow (1993) constructed a measure of school membership, the Psychological Sense of School Membership Scale (PSSM). The PSSM was employed with two samples of adolescents to investigate the scale's reliability and delineate its factor structure, while also extending its use to high school age youth. Consistent with the author's hypotheses, the PSSM was associated closely with students' self-concepts and ratings of school climate. Findings were integrated into Wehlage's model of school membership, and the relevance of this model for typical secondary school youth is described.