2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The concept of belonging is ubiquitous in recent literature about undergraduate engineering and computer science recruitment and retention, yet conceptualizations of the construct can be ill-defined. While quantitative, survey-based efforts can show correlations between a students’ self-described belonging and other variables, qualitative studies are necessary to learn how and why students develop a sense of belonging in their discipline. In our study, we focus on one interview item related to departmental fit, and categorize the complex ways students perceived their own belonging, or lack of belonging.
This study adopts a comprehensive framework based on the work of Allen and colleagues for considering belonging and applies the framework to interviews focused on student belonging to their academic department. As students described whether or not they felt they belonged to their academic department, they described what contextual factors supported feelings of belonging, and which did not. They also described elements of their embodied identities that supported feelings of belonging, such as personality traits and demographic markers.
Authors coded based on the four elements of belonging as defined by Allen- competencies from belonging, opportunities to belong, motivations to belong, and perceptions of belonging. Interview data from 70 undergraduate computing students suggest great variability in student perspectives of belonging, with individual characteristics, or traits of the individual, and contextual characteristics from the academic environment serving to sustain a sense of belonging. In addition, our dataset from Hispanic Serving institutions and emerging Hispanic Serving Institutions shows characteristics of departments that support student opportunities and competencies that promote belonging. In this paper, we document these characteristics and provide recommendations for departmental belonging.