Investigation of Belonging for Engineering and Science Undergraduates by Year in School

Abstract

Belonging is an important factor in STEM education and is a basic human need which is dependent on social relationships for fulfillment. In this work, researchers at five institutions continued a multi-year study of belonging among engineering and science students. For this study, belonging is separated into four separate constructs: belonging to class, belonging to major, belonging to the university as an institution, and belonging to the university as a community. The focus of this work is on self-reported belonging for STEM undergraduates by classification (year in school), and the following hypothesis was tested: belonging will increase monotonically with student classification. From spring 2010 through spring 2011, a combined total of more than 900 students completed surveys at a large Research institution located in the Northwest, a Historically Black College/University (HBCU) in the Southeast, a women's college in the Northeast, a small private faith-based institution in the Northwest, and a large teaching institution in the Midwest. The four types of belonging, or scales, were included in the survey assessing individual characteristics and academic experiences. Belonging scores across all institutions ranged from 14.08 to 18.12 out of 20.00 for four item scales and 9.49 to 12.68 out of 15.00 for the three item scale (belonging to the university as a community). The results of the analysis indicate that, although statistically significant differences in belonging were observed based on student classification at individual institutions, the differences did not support a monotonic increase by classification hypothesized at all schools for all types of belonging. The authors attempt to explain these observations based on cohort effects, institutional contexts and other factors.

The Relationship Between Sense of Belonging and Student Outcomes in CS1 and Beyond

“…A multiinstitutional study conducted by Smith et al researched sense of belonging in engineering at five institutions with respect to their sense of belonging to their course, major, university as an institution and university as a community. Their results did not support the idea that sense of belonging increases as students work their way through a degree in STEM [27].…”

“…We used a subset of the sense of belonging instrument from Smith et al [27], which focused on sense of belonging at the class level, as we were interested in students' feelings of belonging in their immediate CS environment (i.e., their classes). Specifically we asked the students "Reflecting on your experiences over the past week, to what extent do you agree with the following statements:".…”

“…Ratings were added, with the final statement reverse-coded, to give a total sense of belonging score in the range of 4 to 20. Previous studies have used a variety of methods to combine the likert scaled ratings, such as summing [26,27,30,32] or averaging [11,14,21,28,29] the ratings. We chose to sum the ratings because it was consistent with how these questions were aggregated in the original work [27] and to better match the study conducted by Sax et al that we are expanding upon [26].…”

Work in Progress: Common Reading Experience: Assessing the Impact on Perceptions, Identity, and Belonging Among First-year Engineering Students

“…A sense of belonging "reflects the feeling that one fits in, belongs to, or is a member of the academic community in question" (Good, Rattan, & Dweck, 2012, p700). If a student does not feel that they belong to a certain major, they may have difficulty engaging in the material or the community, and they may be less likely to persist (Smith et al, 2012). Increasing sense of belonging can be of particular importance for students in underrepresented groups -in engineering, women and underrepresented minorities -as they already may feel doubts that they can integrate into the major (Jordan, Sorby, & Amato-Henderson, 2012;Litzler & Samuelson, 2013;Walton & Cohen, 2011;Weaver, Decaro, Hieb, & Ralston, 2008) .…”

Assessing the Culture of Engineering Student Project Teams

“…A sense of belonging is when a student feels as if they fit in and belong to a community [23]; similarly, a sense of community means that students feel that they matter to a group and have a shared connection to others in the group [24]. If a student feels that they belong and have community with a group, they will be more likely to engage with others, actively participate, and persist in the group experience [25]. Students who do not feel that they belong, or do not find community, are likely to gain less benefit from the experience; this feeling can be even more prevalent among underrepresented groups who already question their place within the community (in engineering project teams, this is likely to be women or underrepresented minorities) [26], [27].…”