2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This WIP research investigates the effect of informal student-faculty micro-interactions on students’ sense of belonging using a population of undergraduate biomedical engineers (BMEs). Informal student-faculty interactions have been shown to benefit students' learning outcomes. However, current research lacks investigation on the types of the informal interactions that benefit students the most. Prior surveys have revealed that students who did not belong to a student organization are more likely to feel uncomfortable in their major, which is a problem we also observed. We introduced organized student-faculty lunches to provide a gathering place to benefit these students through controlled informal student-faculty interaction. We assessed the outcomes of these lunches under previously reported frameworks for student-faculty interactions.
Twenty-three (23) non-graduating BME undergraduate students from April to December 2023, in groups of 3-5, participated in department-sponsored lunches with faculty members based on shared interests. Confirmed students completed an anonymous pre-intervention survey of 10 questions, with 8 Likert-scale questions based on the framework (1: strongly disagree, 5: strongly agree) and 2 free response questions to understand the students’ motivation for attending the lunch. Students also voluntarily provided their demographic information in the pre-survey. Immediately after the lunch, students took a post-survey with the identical Likert-scale questions and two additional free-form questions for feedback. The Likert-scale questions were reissued as a second post-survey one month later. Paired t-tests were performed on results from pre- vs. post-survey and pre- vs. one-month post-survey. Holm-Bonferroni corrections for multiple comparisons were performed to analyze potential improvements in the Likert-scale questions. Our IRB approved the project as an exempt study.
We received 20 and 14 valid responses (87.0% and 60.9% response rate) for the immediate and one-month post-surveys. Students reported significant improvement in multiple aspects of our survey, including Q1 (knowledge of events, p<0.001), Q2 (participation and satisfaction of events, p=0.007), Q3 (sense of belonging, p=0.004), Q7 (clarity of career goals, p<0.001), and Q8 (knowledge of DEI, p=0.021). The one-month post-survey results featured fewer students yet achieved statistical significance that lasted through the one-month post-survey in Q2, Q3, Q7, and Q8 with similar significance levels. One notable difference is that Q6 (intention to graduate from major) showed significance in students wanting to complete their degree in BME in the pair of pre- vs. the immediate post-survey (p=0.019). In general, the improvements in the one-month post-survey followed the same trend as the immediate post-survey with minimal regressions.
The data suggests a positive and lasting correlation between students’ sense of belonging and informal student-faculty micro-interactions through the organized lunches. Our approach is highly translatable with minimal cost and commitment of human resources. We plan to investigate the potential equity of the effects across underserved populations with more subjects.