2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

What Do Students Remember and Take Away from An Ecological Belonging Intervention Designed to Address Equity Gaps for Women and Black, Latiné, and Indigenous Students in Engineering?

Presented at NSF Grantees Poster Session I

Our project uses an ecological belonging intervention that requires one class session to implement and has been shown to eliminate equity gaps in student outcomes in introductory STEM courses. We describe disparate impacts on outcomes as equity gaps because they exist not from any deficit of the students themselves but rather due to systemic issues of marginalization. Our NSF IUSE: EDU Program, Institutional, and Community Transformation track grant brings this intervention into engineering where during the grant period we have implemented the intervention at three strategically chosen universities in both first- and second-year engineering courses. The intervention focuses on common challenges faced by students in engineering and is introduced by instructors early in the semester. Our research has demonstrated that the intervention is effective during the first year in supporting belonging for Black, Latiné, and Indigenous (BLI) students and in reducing equity gaps in academic performance during a first-year programming course. Our research has also demonstrated that BLI students who receive the intervention have improved help-seeking behaviors and are more likely to be retained in engineering into the second college year and that women students who receive the intervention may have more positive self-efficacy.

Our project is comprehensive in the development and delivery of the ecological belonging intervention and in the study of its effects. We use focus groups to understand challenges engineering students face in their courses and in different institutional contexts to contextualize the intervention specifically to each course in which it is delivered. We also provide instructor onboarding and training to deliver the intervention which includes an overview of the theoretical frameworks that undergird the intervention and how those theoretical properties are actualized and delivered during the intervention. These efforts along with the rest of our training are aimed at increasing implementation fidelity as we hypothesize that the intervention is most effective when fidelity is high. Our work is guided by a theory-of-action that is the backbone of the project’s research activities and iterative processes of improvement. We use a synergistic mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods to study both student and faculty outcomes.

To expand on understanding the impacts of the intervention on students, we have recently begun to examine how students experience the intervention, if they remember it, what they remember about it, and what they feel they gained from it. In this paper, we provide an overview of our findings in this area using data collected from surveys of two first-year engineering programming courses at two study institutions and focus groups and interviews with students at the third institution where the intervention is being implemented within second-year courses in specific engineering majors. We will also report on our continued research on the efficacy of the intervention on student outcomes. In their totality, the results of this work can provide actionable strategies for reducing equity gaps in students' degree attainment and achievement in engineering.

Authors

Dr. Linda DeAngelo http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8508-5909 University of Pittsburgh [biography]

Linda DeAngelo is Associate Professor of Higher Education in the School of Education and Director of Graduate Studies with a secondary faculty appointment in the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program at the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. DeAngelo studies social stratification, investigating how social inequities are produced, maintained, and interrupted. Currently her scholarship focuses on access to and engagement in faculty mentorship, the pathway into and through graduate education, and gender and race in engineering.
Dr. Allison Godwin http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0741-3356 Cornell University [biography]

Allison Godwin, Ph.D. is the Dr. G. Stephen Irwin '67, '68 Professor in Engineering Education Research (Associate Professor) in the Robert Frederick Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Cornell University. She is also the Associate Director of the Cornell NanoScale Science and Technology Facility and a McCormick Teaching Excellence Institute Research Fellow. Her research focuses on how identity, among other affective factors, influences diverse groups of students to choose engineering and persist in engineering. She also studies how different experiences within the practice and culture of engineering foster or hinder belonging, motivation, and identity development. Dr. Godwin graduated from Clemson University with a B.S. in Chemical Engineering and Ph.D. in Engineering and Science Education. Her research earned her a National Science Foundation CAREER Award focused on characterizing latent diversity, which includes diverse attitudes, mindsets, and approaches to learning to understand engineering students’ identity development. She has won several awards for her research including the 2021 Chemical Engineering Education William H. Corcoran Award, 2022 American Educational Research Association Education in the Professions (Division I) 2021-2022 Outstanding Research Publication Award, and the 2023 AIChE Excellence in Engineering Education Research Award.
Mr. Matthew Bahnson http://orcid.org/https://0000-0002-0134-0125 Purdue University at West Lafayette (COE) [biography]

Matthew Bahnson completed his Ph.D. in the Applied Social and Community Psychology program in at North Carolina State University. His previous training includes a B.A. in Psychology from the University of Northern Iowa and an M.A. in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago. Matthew’s research focuses on sociocultural inequality in engineering graduate education with the intention of increasing diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice in STEM graduate education. He is completed a postdoctoral appointment in engineering education with the Engineering Cognitive Research Laboratory with Dr. Catherin Berdanier at Pennsylvania State University. He is currently a Research Scientist at Purdue University with the STRIDE research group directed by Dr. Allison Godwin at Cornell University.
Dr. Danielle V. Lewis http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7266-6328 University at Buffalo [biography]

Dr. Danielle Vegas Lewis is currently the Postdoctoral Associate in Dr. Courtney Faber's ENLITE lab in the Department of Engineering Education at the University at Buffalo. Her research agenda aims to understand and disrupt the ways in which socially constructed identities allow for the reproduction of social inequality, with a focus on understanding the ways institutions of higher education and other social structures challenge or uphold hegemonic environments in which majority populations accumulate power that harms students underrepresented in certain contexts.
Prof. Natascha Trellinger Buswell http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8503-5787 University of California, Irvine [biography]

Natascha Trellinger Buswell is an associate professor of teaching in the department of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of California, Irvine. She earned her B.S. in aerospace engineering at Syracuse University and her Ph.D. in engineering education at Purdue University. She is particularly interested in inclusive teaching conceptions and methods and graduate level engineering education.
Erica McGreevy University of Pittsburgh [biography]

Teaching Associate Professor
Department of Biological Sciences
Dr. Christian D Schunn University of Pittsburgh [biography]

Dr. Christian D. Schunn is a professor of Psychology, Intelligent Systems, and Learning Sciences and Policy at the University of Pittsburgh. He is also a senior scientist at the Learning Research and Development Center. He received his Ph.D. in Psycholo
Eric Trevor McChesney http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7831-9642 University of Pittsburgh [biography]

Eric McChesney (he/him) is a Postdoctoral Scholar for Psychosocial Interventions at Scale with the Learning Research and Development center at the University of Pittsburgh. His work focuses on the development of robust, transferrable psychosocial interventions that improve the outcomes of and environments experienced by women, people of color, and other historically-marginalized students pursuing degrees in Science, Engineering, Mathematics, and Technology (STEM). A further strand of his research examines the development of interdisciplinarity in the sciences and works to define the mechanisms by which it is formed, identify the contexts conducive to its flourishing, and develop the educational experiences that accelerate its development.
Blayne D. Stone University of Pittsburgh
Liwei Chen University of Pittsburgh
Carlie Laton Cooper M.Ed. University of Georgia [biography]

Carlie is a doctoral student in the Louise McBee Institute of Higher Education at the University of Georgia (UGA). She earned a bachelor’s degree in Psychology from UGA (2017) and a Master of Education in Higher Education Administration from Georgia Southern University (2021). She has higher education experience in business affairs and academic advising. She researches structures that contribute to underrepresentation in STEM majors and is currently a Graduate Research Assistant for the UBelong Collaborative.
Spencer Currie University of California, Irvine
Charlie Díaz University of Pittsburgh [biography]

Charlie Diaz is a PhD student studying Higher Education at the University of Pittsburgh. He is a recipient of the K. Leroy Irvis Fellowship. His research interests include minoritized student experiences in Higher Ed, student activism, and the development of inclusive policy and practice in Higher Ed.
Gerard Dorvè-Lewis http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5542-2057 University of Pittsburgh [biography]

Gerard Dorvè-Lewis (he/him) is a higher education PhD student and scholar at the University of Pittsburgh. His broad research interests include equity and social justice in higher education, first-generation college students, Black students, and student success. Prior to beginning his doctoral journey, he worked full-time in student affairs at the University of Florida where he also earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Family, Youth, and Community Sciences.
Rachel Kelly Forster University of Pittsburgh
Kevin Jay Kaufman-Ortiz http://orcid.org/https://0000-0001-6488-7104 Purdue University/Cornell University [biography]

Kevin Jay Kaufman Ortiz holds a B.S. and M.S. in Industrial Engineering from the University of Puerto Rico Mayagüez Campus and Purdue University respectively. He is also a licensed mathematics teacher by the Department of Education in Puerto Rico. Kevin is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Engineering Education at Purdue University. His interests center around national identity, engineering culture, acculturation, and inclusion of colonial migrants from the U.S. territories who are looking to pursue engineering careers in the contiguous United States.
Melissa Lepe http://orcid.org/https://0000-0001-5701-7354 University of California, Irvine [biography]

Melissa Lepe is Ph.D. student at the University of California-Irvine. Her research interests include aircraft sustainability, aeroacoustics, and engineering education. Through her work at the UCI Aircraft Systems Laboratory and the Buswell Research Lab, she has worked on merging her interests in aviation and education to promote inclusivity, equity, and diversity in the aerospace field.
Kelly Tatone University of Pittsburgh [biography]

Kelly Tatone (she/her), M.Ed., is a research project supervisor at the University of Pittsburgh. She earned her graduate degree in 2022, working full-time and going to school part-time as a post-traditional student. She graduated from The Pennsylvania State University in 1990 with a B.A. in English Literature. She is the proud mother of three amazing women, which is her greatest source of pride.

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 22, 2025, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 25, 2025

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