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Attrition is a significant issue for STEM undergraduate majors: on average 49% of students transfer to another major or leave college completely by their 8th year of study. Barring financial barriers to retention, the most significant drivers of attrition are reported to be difficulty in adjusting to academic and life needs and resolving educational and occupational goals, and feelings of isolation. We posit that the former impediments are closely related to ineffective Self-Regulation of Learning (SRL), since SRL addresses an individual’s behaviors and strategies as an independent and reflective learner, and their motivation to sustain effort when challenged. We posit that the latter impediment is closely related to a lack of sense of belonging (SOB), since SOB addresses an individual’s cognition, affects, and behavior around their perceived legitimacy as a member of a community who is included, involved, valued, and accepted. Further, it documented that many students enter college with ineffective SRL, and that particular students have fewer relatable peers and so are more at risk of having a low sense of belonging in college. So, can retention be improved by systematically training students in effective SRL strategies? This NSF IUSE project draws upon published research of educational psychology social-cognitive frameworks around SOB (Strayhorn, 2019) and SRL (Zimmerman, 2000 and 2002), and the findings of a prior NSF-funded study and a pilot study, to uniquely develop and refine an intervention that synergistically interweaves the learning of STEM topics with developing effective SRL and building SOB. Project: This 3-year IUSE:HER Level 1 project is completing its first year. In the first year, 80 sophomore civil engineering students received training in SRL to improve their metacognitive knowledge, awareness, and experience, and develop personalized and adaptable strategies for building effective SRL. Key findings include student perception of the importance and helpfulness of the intervention, and statistics regarding uptake of SRL, SRL effectiveness, SOB, and performance in major courses taken alongside the intervention. Broader impacts: This project creatively incorporates evidence-based advances in educational psychology and education into undergraduate STEM education and lays the groundwork for significant institutional improvement in associates and baccalaureate STEM programs by offering a replicable, transferable, and adaptable design. 

This works seeks to develop and assess a retention intervention that addresses the key drivers of attrition and learns from existing interventions for engineering students. The resulting intervention addresses key competencies for the major and profession, and also addresses a gap in current approaches: the need to synergistically support students’ social-cognitive disposition with respect to attrition by training them in social-cognitive skills and strategies adapted from the theories of Sense of Belonging (SOB) and Self-Regulation of Learning (SRL). Because the degree of skills and strategies around SRL and SOB needed to make the largest impact to retention is unknown, four versions of the intervention are proposed: A base intervention which provokes students to think about their learning and belonging, an intervention augmented with specific training in effective SRL, an intervention augmented with specific training in SOB; and an intervention augmented with training in both effective SRL and SOB. An overarching research design plans the offering and assessment of each version of the intervention, including a numerical longitudinal analysis of retention at the end of the study, with the ultimate goal of identifying which version of the intervention has the largest positive impact to retention and other key metrics. After a general description of the intervention as a while, the focus was reoriented to the base version of the intervention. The detailed design was presented along with the assessment methods for short-term effectiveness and the preliminary results for its first offering in Fall 2022. Overall, students found the topics covered in the intervention to be helpful and used many of the skills and strategies from the intervention in other major courses. The impact of the intervention on performance in major courses taken alongside the intervention and their persistence rate in the major for another semester improved significantly for one major course but were inconclusive for a second major course. Recommendations were made to refine the materials provided to students and several of the activities in the base intervention; and the formative assessment tool.