The Broader Role of Middle School Associations

4-8 Middle School
Written By CHARLES PETERS

The Middle School Inclusivity Index survey uses 18 qualities that to some degree overlap with the Upper School version.  To align the content with the development stage, we do add new quality dimensions including Understanding Identity, Learning Mode (learning to think), Emotional Dialogue and Association Range. Through the early years of the survey, we’ve gained an understanding of how the scoring varies across the 18 qualities. One interesting observation is that one of the new qualities, Association Range, consistently is one of the weakest qualities and often averages a negative score.

The positive and negative statements used for the Middle School survey for Association Range variable are shown below:

To provide further input, we researched the correlation between the Association Range and the other 17 qualities in the survey, averaging the correlations across all the surveys in the archive. This analysis split the relationships into roughly 4 categories:

The first group of three shows the “Stronger Relationships.”  These are aspirational qualities including Multicultural Orientation, Socio-emotional Development, and Voice in Class. A larger second category where there is “Some Relationship” between the qualities includes nine qualities.  The final “Weak” and “Negative Relationships” group is most telling.  Of the five qualities, three of them are associated with the Personal Experience group and are indicative of a challenging experience for students.  These include Worry and Stress, Trauma and Discrimination and Bias.

Given the input on how students choose to spend their time and build their associations from the quality scoring for this quality, and the contrast in associations between strong and negative relationships, several questions arise.

  • Is the understanding of the hierarchy of the strength of a these relationship important to student development?

  • How can we explain the linkage between Association Range and a difficult student experience?

  • Should the link between aspirational qualities like Multi-cultural Orientation and Scio-emotional Development influence the importance we attach to Association Range?

  • How can we create actions and communications that teach and encourage students to value their broad associations?

CHARLES PETERS
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