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2024 Collaborative Network for Engineering & Computing Diversity (CoNECD)

An ecological belonging intervention for equity: Impacts to date and promising directions

Presented at Track 2: Technical Session 1: An ecological belonging intervention for equity: Impacts to date and promising directions

Keywords: Undergraduate, Race/Ethnicity, Engineering, Belonging

Introductory engineering courses in the first and second year often have equity gaps in student academic performance for women and Black, Latino/a/x, and Indigenous (BLI) students. Much of prior research on and rationales for these equity gaps in student outcomes have been deficit-based (e.g., lack of preparation) or have focused on providing just-in-time supports for students who are struggling. This research leverages a promising ecological belonging intervention conducted in a first-year engineering programming course with documented, persistent equity gaps for BLI students to address struggle at the beginning of the course before students experience struggle in the course context. This intervention is grounded in two complementary theoretical frameworks including identity threat and belonging uncertainty. Identity threat is concern people have in situations in which the positive image of their ingroup is threatened by the activation of negative group stereotypes, or by the devaluation or stigmatization of the ingroup. This threat triggers belonging uncertainty about an individual’s sense of positive relations with others in their course, major, etc. Both of these conditions impact students’ experiences and abilities to do well in their courses.

This work answers the research questions:

1. What are the experiences of students in an introductory engineering course?
2. How does the ecological belonging intervention change students’ feelings of belonging in the course?
3. What effect does the intervention have on short- and long-term academic success as measured by achievement (course-specific, overall GPA) and choice (retention, engineering career pathways)?
4. What are the effects of implementing the intervention on instructors’ attitudes and mindsets about supporting students in their courses?

Data for this work came from focus groups with students who previously took the course to develop stories used in the belonging. We also collected pre- and post-semester surveys of student attitudes in three intervention sections (n = 360) and three control sections (n = 331) and longitudinal interviews with a subset of students (n = 77) who were in these courses with stratified sampling by gender and race/ethnicity to ensure representation of women, non-binary, and BLI students.

This presentation will discuss considerations of contextualizing the intervention to engineering courses and the theory of action for how the intervention works. We will present the intervention impacts on student belonging, equity gaps in the course, and retention from survey and institutional data. Finally, we will discuss the emerging results of qualitative research on students and faculty in the intervention. To date, we have promising results that indicate this intervention is addressing equity gaps in student belonging and performance in this introductory course and shaping positive experiences for both students and faculty.

Authors
  4. Erica McGreevy University of Pittsburgh [biography]
  6. Anne-Ketura Elie University of Pittsburgh [biography]
  8. Ms. Jacqueline Rohde Georgia Institute of Technology [biography]
  10. Charlie Díaz University of Pittsburgh [biography]
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