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An ecological belonging intervention for equity: Impacts to date and promising directions

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Conference

2024 Collaborative Network for Engineering & Computing Diversity (CoNECD)

Location

Arlington, Virginia

Publication Date

February 25, 2024

Start Date

February 25, 2024

End Date

February 27, 2024

Conference Session

Track 2: Technical Session 1: An ecological belonging intervention for equity: Impacts to date and promising directions

Tagged Topics

Diversity and CoNECD Paper Sessions

Page Count

28

DOI

10.18260/1-2--45431

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/45431

Download Count

64

Paper Authors

biography

Allison Godwin Cornell University Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-0741-3356

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Allison Godwin, Ph.D. is an associate professor in the Robert Frederick Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Cornell University. Her research focuses on how identity, among other affective factors, influences diverse 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 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 2016 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 Journal of Civil Engineering Education Best Technical Paper, the 2021 Chemical Engineering Education William H. Corcoran Award, the 2022 American Educational Research Association Education in the Professions (Division I) 2021-2022 Outstanding Research Publication Award, and the 2023 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Award for Excellence in Engineering Education Research.

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Linda DeAngelo University of Pittsburgh Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-8508-5909

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Linda DeAngelo is Associate Professor of Higher Education, Center for Urban Education Faculty Fellow, and affiliated faculty 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.

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Eric Trevor McChesney University of Pittsburgh Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0001-7831-9642

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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.

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Erica McGreevy University of Pittsburgh

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Teaching Associate Professor
Department of Biological Sciences

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Gerard Dorvè-Lewis University of Pittsburgh Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0001-5542-2057

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Gerard Dorvè-Lewis (he/him) is a higher education PhD student and scholar at the University of Pittsburgh. His broad research interests include emerging adulthood, diversity, equity, and inclusion in higher education, first-generation college students, Black students, higher education policy, 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.

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Anne-Ketura Elie University of Pittsburgh

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Anne-Ketura Elie earned a BS degree in 2019 in psychology from the University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida.

She is currently a graduate student researcher at the University of Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her research interests are the factors that foster sense of belonging in academic settings, more specifically teacher-student relationship factors that promote student’s sense of belonging and adaptive meaning making.

Ms. Elie is also a member of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.

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Kevin Jay Kaufman-Ortiz Purdue University at West Lafayette (COE) Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0001-6488-7104

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Kevin Jay Kaufman Ortiz holds a B.S. in Industrial Engineering from the University of Puerto Rico Mayagüez Campus and is a licensed mathematics teacher by the Department of Education in Puerto Rico. Kevin is currently an M.S. student in the School of Industrial Engineering as well as a Ph.D. student in the School of Engineering Education at Purdue University. His interests currently lie in cultural identity, engineering culture, acculturation, decolonization, belonging, and inclusion of occupational migrants from the U.S. territories who are looking to pursue engineering degrees and work in the mainland U.S.

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Jacqueline Ann Rohde Georgia Institute of Technology

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Jacqueline (Jacki) Rohde is the Assessment Coordinator in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her interests are in sociocultural norms in engineering and the professional development of engineering students.

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Heather Lee Perkins Purdue University at West Lafayette (PPI) Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-8757-0545

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Heather graduated from the Applied Social and Community Psychology program in the spring of 2021, after completing her Bachelor of Science in Psychology from the University of Cincinnati. She has participated in various research projects examining the int

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Charlie Díaz University of Pittsburgh

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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.

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Social psychologist with an interest in diversity and belonging in STEM.

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Abstract

Keywords: Undergraduate, Race/Ethnicity, Engineering, Belonging

Introductory engineering courses in the first and second year often have equity gaps in student academic performance for women and Black, Latino/a/x, and Indigenous (BLI) students. Much of prior research on and rationales for these equity gaps in student outcomes have been deficit-based (e.g., lack of preparation) or have focused on providing just-in-time supports for students who are struggling. This research leverages a promising ecological belonging intervention conducted in a first-year engineering programming course with documented, persistent equity gaps for BLI students to address struggle at the beginning of the course before students experience struggle in the course context. This intervention is grounded in two complementary theoretical frameworks including identity threat and belonging uncertainty. Identity threat is concern people have in situations in which the positive image of their ingroup is threatened by the activation of negative group stereotypes, or by the devaluation or stigmatization of the ingroup. This threat triggers belonging uncertainty about an individual’s sense of positive relations with others in their course, major, etc. Both of these conditions impact students’ experiences and abilities to do well in their courses.

This work answers the research questions:

1. What are the experiences of students in an introductory engineering course? 2. How does the ecological belonging intervention change students’ feelings of belonging in the course? 3. What effect does the intervention have on short- and long-term academic success as measured by achievement (course-specific, overall GPA) and choice (retention, engineering career pathways)? 4. What are the effects of implementing the intervention on instructors’ attitudes and mindsets about supporting students in their courses?

Data for this work came from focus groups with students who previously took the course to develop stories used in the belonging. We also collected pre- and post-semester surveys of student attitudes in three intervention sections (n = 360) and three control sections (n = 331) and longitudinal interviews with a subset of students (n = 77) who were in these courses with stratified sampling by gender and race/ethnicity to ensure representation of women, non-binary, and BLI students.

This presentation will discuss considerations of contextualizing the intervention to engineering courses and the theory of action for how the intervention works. We will present the intervention impacts on student belonging, equity gaps in the course, and retention from survey and institutional data. Finally, we will discuss the emerging results of qualitative research on students and faculty in the intervention. To date, we have promising results that indicate this intervention is addressing equity gaps in student belonging and performance in this introductory course and shaping positive experiences for both students and faculty.

Godwin, A., & DeAngelo, L., & McChesney, E. T., & McGreevy, E., & Dorvè-Lewis, G., & Elie, A., & Kaufman-Ortiz, K. J., & Rohde, J. A., & Perkins, H. L., & Díaz, C., & Binning, K. R. (2024, February), An ecological belonging intervention for equity: Impacts to date and promising directions Paper presented at 2024 Collaborative Network for Engineering & Computing Diversity (CoNECD), Arlington, Virginia. 10.18260/1-2--45431

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