2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This empirical work-in-progress paper presents preliminary findings from a longitudinal mixed-methods study examining the relationship between psychological safety, sense of belonging, and expectations of success in engineering among first-year engineering students at a public R1 university located in the United States. There is a critical need to educate and graduate more engineers to meet state and national workforce needs, but retaining undergraduate engineering students continues to be a challenge. One factor that may help retain engineering students is increased psychological safety on their engineering teams. Psychological safety is the shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking without fear of repercussions. Psychological safety can improve teamwork and may be linked with sense of belonging and expectations of success for engineering students, which are two key constructs linked with retention in engineering. While prior research has explored psychological safety on undergraduate engineering teams, its longitudinal impact on first-year students’ outcomes remains underexplored. We draw on Conservation of Resources theory to consider how psychological safety relates to academic outcomes and subsequent persistence in engineering. The underlying principle is that students aim to retain and accumulate resources and avoid the loss of resources, where psychological safety in a learning environment can enhance perceived resources while minimizing perceived threats, thus leading to positive academic outcomes and long-term persistence in an engineering major. We draw on initial data from a longitudinal cohort study of first-year engineering students employing a convergent mixed methods design. Data is being collected through a survey using validated measures for psychological safety, sense of belonging, and expectancy, along with open-ended responses to add depth on student experiences in first-year courses. Students will respond to the survey four times per semester for a total of eight times during their first year in engineering. We expect a total of 750 students to respond to each survey as part of course requirements. We present preliminary findings from quantitative and qualitative responses during student’s first semester of engineering in Fall 2025. Quantitative data will be analyzed using repeated-measures multilevel modeling, which accommodates the nested data structure and allows us to capture individual changes in psychological safety over time, to evaluate the relationships between psychological safety, sense of belonging, and expectancy, and to evaluate whether there are differential effects of team psychological safety on belonging and expectancy. A subset of the qualitative data will be analyzed using thematic analysis to explore potential reasons for changes in psychological safety over time and examine why psychological safety, belonging, and expectations of success may be related. Findings from this study may inform the timing and design of targeted interventions to foster improved team and classroom environments, ultimately supporting broader efforts to improve retention in engineering education. Qualitative responses may also suggest potential directions for the development and evaluation of interventions or educational practices. Positive practices can then be adapted and evaluated in different settings while negative practices can be modified or removed in future offerings in the first-year program.