Despite the well-known positive effect of students’ sense of school belonging for various educational outcomes, empirical research exploring the sources of school belonging is still sparse. Particularly, the question of how education system characteristics might contribute to immigrant-nonimmigrant student differences in their sense of school belonging remains unexplored. Since students' sense of school belonging is shaped by their experiences at school, we assume that the education system characteristics significantly impact their sense of belonging (c.p. Allen & Kern, 2017: 54ff.). This study focuses on a central feature of education systems: between-school tracking (shortly: tracking; e.g. Allmendinger 1989: 233). Specifically, we ask whether tracking, i.e. the grouping of students into different types of secondary schools according to ability (e.g. Betts 2012), affects ethnic inequality in school belonging.

School belonging has been defined as “the extent to which students feel personally accepted, respected, included, and supported by others in the school social environment” (Goodenow and Grady 1993, p. 80). It has been found to positively affect students’ educational outcomes by increasing their academic motivation, reducing the risk of school absenteeism, and enforcing more positive academic self-efficacy (Allen et al., 2018).

Previous studies suggest that immigrant students often tend to have a lower sense of school belonging than nonimmigrant students (Allen et al., 2021; Chiu et al., 2012; Chiu et al., 2016; Ham et al., 2017). In contrast, other studies find no differences between minority and majority students (Ma, 2003) or even a higher sense of belonging among minority students (De Bortoli, 2018; Pong & Zeiser, 2012). 

We hypothesize that education system characteristics, i.e. tracking, may explain these mixed findings. Due to social differences in scholastic achievement (i.e., primary effects, Boudon, 1974), the sorting process in tracked education systems is expected to lead to more pronounced school segregation of immigrants and a higher proportion of immigrant students in the lower educational tracks. School segregation as a result of tracking may have different - and at times counteracting - effects on the sense of school belonging of immigrant students.
Higher-track students benefit from the prestige of their school, resulting in a positive attitude towards school and a stronger sense of belonging (the "basking in reflected glory effect". Cialdini et al., 1976). By contrast, lower-track students may perceive school as a source of failure and low status, causing them to oppose it (stigmatization, e.g., Van Houtte, 2006). Since immigrant students are more likely to attend lower tracks, the stigma of the lower track would cause a lower feeling of school belonging among immigrant students as compared to nonimmigrant students. Thus, tracking would lead to higher inequality in school belonging.
In contrast to the effects of stigmatization, the homophily principle (McPherson et al., 2001) suggests that school homogeneity in ethnicity could also positively affect the sense of school belonging. According to the homophily principle, relationships between similar people regarding various social characteristics are more likely to occur, and peer relationships in turn are a key factor in the sense of school belonging (Allen et al., 2018). This effect applies to immigrant and non-immigrant students. However, the often higher educational aspirations of immigrant students could result in  a more positive attitudinal climate and higher levels of school belonging in schools with a higher share of immigrant students.
Together, tracking might have counteracting effects on the inequality in students’ sense of school belonging between immigrant and nonimmigrant students. It thus remains an empirical question which of these counteracting effects has more weight in determining inequality in the sense of school belonging.

To examine the role of tracking for explaining differences in the sense of school belonging between nonimmigrant and immigrant students, we draw on several waves from the large-scale assessment studies PIRLS (2011, 2016), TIMSS 4th grade and 8th grade (2011, 2015, 2019), and PISA (2015, 2018). These datasets are especially suited for our research question because they provide rich information on students’ family backgrounds and sense of school belonging and cover both tracked and non-tracked education systems. This enables us to investigate how tracking affects immigrant and nonimmigrant students’ sense of school belonging while controlling for a range of relevant individual-, school- and country-specific characteristics. Our analyses are based on 52 countries, of which ten countries track students in grade between 5 and 8 (early-tracking countries), and 42 countries track students at a later age or do not track at all (late-tracking countries). Our dependent variable – the sense of school belonging – is based on a single item asking about the students’ feeling of belonging at school. The question reads as follows: “I feel like I belong at [this] school” (answer categories ranging from 1 “strongly disagree” to 4 “strongly agree”). To obtain students’ migration status, we relied on an item asking for the language spoken at home most of the time. Students who speak the test language most of the time were coded 0 (majority-language students), and students who speak another language most of the time were coded 1 (minority-language students). In order to identify the effect of tracking on school belonging, we employed a Difference-In-Differences (DiD) approach (Wing et al., 2018). The main advantage of the DID approach is that effects are estimated only by using change within units of interest, in our case, countries (Jakubowski, 2010). Thus, we can investigate differences in the school belonging between early-tracking and late-tracking education systems by comparing differences between the education systems before (among 4th-grade students) and after the tracking took place (among secondary school students).

Preliminary Results Our preliminary results suggest that immigrant students tend to have a lower sense of school belonging than nonimmigrant students. Furthermore, we find a compensatory tracking effect for differences in the sense of school belonging between immigrant and nonimmigrant students. Put differently, these preliminary findings indicate that tracking may reduce inequality in school belonging between immigrant and nonimmigrant students. In the next steps, we aim at a more differentiated operationalization of students’ migration status. In addition, we address possible mechanisms through which tracking could affect the sense of school belonging of immigrant and nonimmigrant students. In particular, migration-specific school segregation and differences in the school’s resources between high and low education tracks are promising points of departure. Conclusions The present research aims at advancing our understanding of sources underlying immigrant students’ sense of school belonging as follows: By theorizing and testing how educational tracking might shape immigrant students’ sense of school belonging, our study underlines the importance of education system characteristics for inequalities in students’ emotional wellbeing. In doing so, we explicitly acknowledge the contextual conditions in which individual education processes occur. The broad multilevel data sources and the DiD approach used in this paper allow generalizable conclusions about the sources underlying immigrant students’ sense of school belonging. Our preliminary results suggest that immigrant students tend to have a lower sense of school belonging than nonimmigrant students. Furthermore, the DiD model results suggest that tracking may mitigate the inequality in school belonging between immigrant and nonimmigrant students. This is an important result for future research, as it highlights the relevance of education system characteristics in understanding ethnic inequality in students’ well-being. However, the mechanisms explaining this positive tracking effect are yet to be elucidated and are the starting point for our more in-depth analyses.

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