2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

A variety of factors impact a student’s sense of belonging. Their perception of the course instructor and the student-instructor relationship contributes to students feeling welcomed and instructors seeming approachable and relatable. Previous studies have shown that the use of ungraded, non-compulsory trivia questions about the instructor’s personal background, hobbies, and experiences can increase student engagement while also contributing to community-building within the classroom. These benefits were demonstrated across different demographics, including instructor gender and university setting (private vs public). However, this practice has so far only been studied in classes of instructors at the mid-career level with approximately 10 to 15 years of teaching experience. This paper investigates the implementation and impact of instructor trivia for three faculty at various experience levels: (1) a first-year tenure-track assistant professor, (2) an assistant teaching professor in her fourth year of teaching, and (3) a tenured professor in his 26th year of teaching.

In this study, instructor trivia was implemented at the halfway point in each instructor’s respective class, and students were surveyed before implementation and at the end of the semester soliciting student perspectives on their sense of belonging, community, and maintaining a life outside engineering. A quantitative comparison of Likert-scale responses in the before and after surveys as well as a qualitative thematic analysis of open-response feedback from the end of the semester will be examined. Differences across class sizes, course levels, and instructor experience and gender will be considered, and examples of trivia questions will be provided.