Collaborative Research: Strategic Course-based Adaptations of an Ecological Belonging Intervention to Broaden Participation in Engineering at Scale

This project aims to serve the national interest by increasing the number and diversity of engineers produced in the United States. While science overall has made great progress in increasing the participation of women, engineering has made no overall progress in the last 20-years, with women continuing to earn only 20% of engineering bachelor’s degrees each year.

Improving retention in the first two years of engineering programs is important in addressing ongoing attrition. In particular, engineering will become more inclusive when the concerns that many students have about feeling alone in thinking they are incapable of mastering the course’s content are addressed. Here, short interventions will be implemented that reveal to students that most of the students in their class have these same concerns, that previous students just like them with similar concerns have successfully completed this coursework, and that their instructor believes they are capable of succeeding.

Prior research by the project team using the intervention in first-year courses has shown that these interventions can entirely eliminate course retention differences by gender as well as by race/ethnicity. A new method for customizing this intervention will be developed, tested, and further improved so that it can have similar strong benefits in many different courses and many different universities.

Simple interventions that can be easily and scientifically customized to many contexts may have potential for significantly improving engineering outcomes across the United States.

This project uses an ecological-belonging intervention approach that only requires a one-class or one-recitation session to implement and has been shown to erase long-standing achievement gaps by gender and race/ethnicity in several introductory STEM courses. However, while simple, the intervention cannot involve a fixed script for different university and course contexts.

Rather, the content of the intervention needs to be customized to the local context in order to address the specific concerns students have in that specific context. This project brings a highly interdisciplinary team across three strategically-selected universities with the goal of developing an approach to identify which 1st and 2nd year courses need this intervention, reveal student concerns in that course, adapt the intervention to address those concerns, and address other pragmatic constraints of how that course is taught.

This systematic approach also includes processes for onboarding all the instructors of the given course. In answering a set of seven core research questions, the project intends to expand knowledge about 1) where (on which outcome variables), when (in which contexts, for which students), and why the ecological belonging intervention has positive effects, and 2) the extent to which this intervention on its own has measurable impacts on the overall problem of representation in the larger challenge of representation within the large engineering pathways that have struggled with representation.

This kind of foundational knowledge is critical to making decisions about when to apply the intervention as well as providing important insights into how to apply the intervention. The NSF IUSE: EHR Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.