2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This Complete Paper presents findings aggregating across seven cohorts (2015-2021) on how first-year engineering students’ sense of belonging changed over the course of their first semester of engineering, how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted their sense of belonging, and the efficacy of sense of belonging as a predictor of graduation. This paper is part of a larger set of studies conducted by an interdisciplinary group of researchers interested in retention of first-year engineering students. These researchers include STEM professors and teacher educators as well as cognitive scientists from units across the university. The research group has conducted longitudinal research on first-year engineering students’ attitudes and beliefs about engineering, college, sense of belonging, as well as demographic and performance data since 2010. Data is collected on surveys given at the beginning and end of the first semester. Since 2015, sense of belonging has been included on these surveys, and with an extensive historical database we make the comparison of how COVID-19 affected first-year students’ sense of belonging in college, as well as exploring the efficacy of freshmen year sense of belonging as a potential predictor of graduation.

Social belonging is defined as feeling acceptance in a group and a sense of belonging can increase self-efficacy and achievement [1]. The sense of belonging scale used in this paper is a four-item Belonging Scale to assess students’ perceptions about sense of belonging in college by Yeager et al., (2016). Sense of belonging has been studied as a possible predictor for student retention and efforts to increase a sense of belonging can help increase student retention [1].

The response to COVID-19 during the Fall 2020 semester shifted much of in-class instruction to completely remote or hybrid course formats. As a result of this unanticipated shift of course instructional formats, the potentially socially isolating nature of remote course instruction may have impacted students’ sense of belonging. This may have subsequent longer-term impacts on student success since sense of belonging in college [1] has been linked to retention, persistence, academic success, and graduation.

A paired samples t-test comparing the mean sense-of-belonging from beginning of freshman year to the end of first semester was computed for seven cohorts of students: fall 2015 – fall 2021 starting semesters. In addition, we report the effect size of any statistically significant difference as Cohen’s d; a commonly accepted interpretation of the magnitude of Cohen’s d effect size is: small d = 0.2, medium d = 0.5, large d = 0.8 [3]. Sense of belonging statistically increased across the first semester for cohorts 2015 (delta-mean = 0.39, Cohen’s d = 0.11) and 2016 (delta-mean = 0.44, Cohen’s d = 0.13); remained statistically the same for cohorts 2017 and 2021; and statistically decreased for cohort 2018 (delta-mean = -0.32 Cohen’s d = -0.10), 2019 (delta-mean = -0.80 Cohen’s d = -0.23) and 2020(COVID-cohort) (delta-mean = -0.95 Cohen’s d = -0.30). Of particular note is that the largest decline by far of sense of belonging over the course of the first semester was during the 2020 COVID cohort year. This suggests that the dramatically impacted first-semester social experience for that cohort was reflected in their reported sense of belonging. While the effect size is small for all cohorts, the 2020 (COVID-cohort) reported the highest effect size with Cohen’s d = -0.30, up to three times larger than in previous cohorts.

To explore the efficacy of sense of belonging as a possible predictor for graduation, we used a 5-year graduate rate since 94% of students who would ultimately graduate had done so by 5 years. Given the 5-year lag time for this outcome, only cohorts 2015-2017 were used for this portion of the analysis. A logistic regression was used on the combined sample from 2015-2017 to predict graduation within 5 years based on a predictor of sense of belonging in college at the end of the first semester. In spite of the very long lag time between end of first semester and graduation 4 or 5 years later, the model showed that mid-year freshmen sense of belonging was a statistically significant predictor of graduation (p<.001). However, as might be expected given the complexity and duration of experiences throughout their college program, this model had a relatively weak effect size (Nagelkerke R^2 = .047). This is an initial step in ongoing research to capture students’ sense of belonging, how it can affect retention or graduation, and how COVID-19 impacted first-year engineering students’ sense of belonging.

References

[1] T. L. Strayhorn, College Students’ Sense of Belonging: A Key to Educational Success. New York: Routledge, 2012.

[2] H. Boone, and A. Kirn, “First Generation Students Identification with and Feelings of Belongingness in Engineering,” Proceedings of the 2016 Annual American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) Conference and Exposition, New Orleans, LA. 10.18260/p.26903, June 26 – 29, 2016.

[3] J. Cohen, Statistical Power Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences (2nd ed.). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Earlbaum Associates, 1988.