Retention in engineering pathways: An ecological belonging intervention supports help-seeking and continued enrollment

Background

The demand for engineers in the workforce continues to rise, which requires increased retention and degree completion at the undergraduate level. Engineering educators need to better understand opportunities to retain students in engineering majors. A strong sense of belonging in engineering represents one important contributor to persistence. However, research has not investigated how academic help-seeking behaviors relate to belonging and downstream outcomes, such as persistence in engineering. Interventions to support and develop belonging show promise in increasing student retention, with particularly positive influences on women, Black, Latino/a/x, and indigenous students. As part of a larger research project, a quasi-experimental intervention to develop a classroom ecology of belonging was conducted at a large Midwestern university in a required first-year, second-semester engineering programming course. The 45-min intervention presented students with stories from past students and peers to normalize academic challenges within the ecology of the classroom as typical and surmountable with perseverance, time, and effort.

Results

With treatment (n = 737) and control (n = 689) participant responses, we investigated how the intervention condition affected students' comfort with seeking academic help and feeling safe being wrong in class as influences on belonging. Using path analysis, a form of structural equation modeling, we measured the influence of these attitudinal variables on belonging and the influence of belonging beyond a student’s grade point average on enrollment as an engineering major the following fall. The path analysis supports the importance of academic help-seeking and feeling safe to be wrong for belonging, as well as the importance of belonging on continued enrollment. A group path analysis compared the treatment and control groups and demonstrated the positive impact of the intervention on enrollment for the treatment participants.

Conclusions

The analyses demonstrate the importance of academic help-seeking in students’ sense of belonging in the classroom with implications for identifying effective tools to improve students’ sense of belonging through supporting help-seeking behaviors.

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Full text here: https://stemeducationjournal.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40594-025-00530-w

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Changing Classroom Ecology to Support Continued Engineering Enrollment

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Engineering requires more bachelor’s degree graduates to meet the growing demand for engineering skills globally. One way to address this demand is increasing student degree completion, which is lower than higher education in general. In particular, Black, Latino/a/x, and Indigenous (BLI) students are less likely to complete an engineering degree than their peers. BLI students experience a host of unwelcoming behaviors in engineering environments that contribute to departure without their intended degree. Improving environments to support belonging may offer one solution. Through an ecological belonging intervention, we seek to improve continued enrollment and increase belonging. Quasi-experimental methods were used in a second-semester engineering programming course. Surveys collected before and after an intervention combined with institutional data were used to test the moderation effects of the intervention on continued enrollment in engineering during the semester following the intervention. BLI students who were enrolled in intervention treatment sections were more likely to be enrolled in engineering the following fall. The intervention treatment increased belonging such that control section participants were less likely to continue to be enrolled in engineering. While research to assess the efficacy and mechanisms of the intervention is ongoing, the intervention offers promising results to address attrition, particularly for BLI students.

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Full text: https://www.mdpi.com/2813-4346/3/2/25

Belonging in engineering for Black, Latinx, and Indigenous students: Promising results from an educational intervention in an introductory programming course

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Contribution: This study demonstrates the efficacy of an ecological belonging intervention in a first-year engineering programming course to increase belonging for Black, Latinx, and Indigenous (BLI) students and close academic equity gaps. Background: Introductory programming courses are often challenging for students and can shape belonging in engineering. BLI students may be particularly susceptible to interpreting struggle as confirmation that they do not belong in predominantly white spaces, which can negatively influence academic outcomes. Research Questions: “What are the effects of an ecological belonging intervention on BLI students’ feelings of belonging within their first-year engineering course?” and “What are the effects of an ecological belonging intervention on BLI students’ performance on a weekly computer programming assignment?” Methodology: The intervention was implemented with 691 students in Spring 2022 and was designed to normalize the struggle to address threats to belonging and close equity gaps in BLI students’ academic performance. A pre-/post-semester survey measuring belonging was analyzed using repeated-measures ANOVA, and pass/fail academic records were analyzed using logistic regression. Findings: The targeted belonging intervention for BLI engineering students can help to address issues of isolation and academic confidence that negatively impact individuals’ sense of belonging and academic performance.

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Full text: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10266391