2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This is a research paper for the Educational Research and Methods Division.

Sense of belonging, here defined as students’ perceived social support, and feelings of connectedness, mattering, acceptance, and respect in socio-academic communities, is considered a key antecedent of important socio-academic outcomes. In higher education research, sense of belonging is often operationalized through examining students' social relationships within the college community, as well as students' associated perception of their integration into the socio-academic community.

However, while sense of belonging is often measured globally (e.g., to the university), students’ sense of belonging to local communities (e.g., classrooms, majors) on campus may differ from their sense of belonging to the university more broadly. This is particularly important in science and engineering education, where research consistently finds that historically excluded students experience these disciplines as hostile and exclusionary. Thus, measuring global sense of belonging to the university may mask the ways students experience specific socio-academic communities, and how those experiences shape their learning.

Thus, the purpose of this research is two-fold. First, drawing on a measure of local sense of belonging (LSOB) developed by Mosyjowski and colleagues that captures students’ socio-academic relationships with peers and faculty, we conceptualize how LSOB can shape these relationships in undergraduate engineering programs. Second, we describe a research study in which we examine the relationships between students’ LSOB to a specific socio-academic community–an introductory calculus course–and other socio-cognitive outcomes, such as their academic adjustment to college, perceptions of the psychological cost of pursuing science and engineering, and course-specific self-efficacy. The following research questions guided this study:

RQ1: What is the relationship between students’ LSOB and their development of socio-academic relationships in the classroom?
RQ2: What is the relationship between students’ LSOB and other socio-cognitive outcomes?
RQ3: How do demographic characteristics, such as race/ethnicity, gender, and international student status, inform students’ LSOB?

We surveyed students enrolled in two sections of an introductory calculus course (N = 223) about their course-specific sense of belonging. We also asked students about their study relationships, their mathematics self-efficacy, academic adjustment to college, and perceptions of the psychological cost of pursuing science and engineering degrees. Finally, we collected demographic data, such as students’ racial/ethnic and gender identities.

We estimated a logistic regression model where the outcome of interest was whether students reported studying for the course with peers or whether they reported studying for the course alone. Results indicated that local sense of belonging amongst peers was a statistically significant, positive predictor of students’ socio-academic relationships, indicating that as their local sense of belonging in the course increased, students were more likely to report studying with peers in the class. Interestingly, students’ local sense of belonging with the faculty was a statistically significant, negative predictor, indicating that as students’ local sense of belonging with faculty increased, they were less likely to report studying with other peers in the course. We discuss implications for research on sense of belonging in engineering education, as well as implications for teaching and learning.