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Engineering requires new solutions to improve undergraduate performance outcomes, including course grades and continued enrollment in engineering pathways. Belonging and engineering role identity have long been associated with successful outcomes in engineering, including academic success, retention, and well‐being. We measure the relationships between belonging and role identity at the beginning of a first‐year engineering course with course grade and continued enrollment in engineering courses. We test the effect of an ecological belonging intervention on student belonging, course grade, and persistence.Students reported their sense of belonging in engineering, cross‐racial experiences, engineering performance/competence, interest in engineering, and engineering recognition before and after an in‐class intervention to improve classroom belonging ecology. Through a series of longitudinal multigroup path analyses, a form of structural equation modeling, we tested the predictive relationships of the measured constructs with engineering identity and investigated differences in these relationships by student gender and race/ethnicity. The proposed model predicts course grades and continued enrollment, providing insight into the potential for interventions to support first‐year engineering students. Group analysis results demonstrate the difference in the function of these psychosocial measures for women and Black, Latino/a/x, and Indigenous (BLI) students, providing insights into the potential importance of sociocultural interventions within engineering classrooms to improve the engineering climate, engagement, and retention of students. ImplicationsThe results highlight the need for more specific, nuanced theoretical investigations of how marginalized students experience the engineering environment and develop social belonging and engineering role identity. 

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.