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This content will become publicly available on June 1, 2025

Title: Changing Classroom Ecology to Support Continued Engineering Enrollment
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.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2111513 2111114
PAR ID:
10541477
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ;
Publisher / Repository:
MDPI
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Trends in Higher Education
Volume:
3
Issue:
2
ISSN:
2813-4346
Page Range / eLocation ID:
423-436
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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