Author(s):
Women and Black, Latinx, and Indigenous (BLI) students in undergraduate engineering courses continue to underperform otherwise-similar peers based on their prior academic preparation, and disproportionately switch to non-engineering majors, constituting an equity challenge and imperiling national science development priorities. Our grant – Course-based Adaptations of an Ecological Belonging Intervention to Transform Engineering Representation at Scale (2111114/2111513) uses an ecological belonging intervention (Binning, et al., 2020) that requires a single class session to implement and that has been shown to erase long-standing equity gaps in achievement in introductory STEM courses, including in a calculus-based physics course for engineers. This intervention targets women and BLI students to support the development of their science self-efficacy, sense of belonging, growth mindset, and engineering identity to address pervasive gaps in academic performance and persistence in engineering. We frame these as equity gaps because they derive from systemic issues of marginalization rather than student deficits. In this grant, we focus on scaling the intervention across three strategically selected universities: the University of Pittsburgh, Purdue University, and University of California, Irvine. The project designs, tests, and iteratively improves upon a systematic, scalable process that identifies engineering courses that exhibit equity gaps, then characterizes student concerns specific to each course and context, adapts the intervention to address these concerns, evaluates the efficacy of the intervention, and identifies universal versus customizable elements of the intervention in these differing environments. Our systematic approach also includes equity-focused training for instructors of the targeted courses. The instructor onboarding and the intervention adaptation processes are guided by a theory-of-action that is the backbone of the project’s research activities. To date we have implemented the intervention at all three universities and in six different courses. Over 5,000 students have participated in the project since its inception. In this poster, we will present both short- and longer-term student outcomes, addressing our student related research questions. In sharing our results to date, we will communicate what we have discovered regarding the underlying mechanisms of how the intervention affects students vis-à-vis our theory-of-action. We will also share student perceptions and experiences of the intervention, its experienced effects over time, and its expressed value to students’ educational pursuits. Among our results we have found that BLI students who experienced the intervention do not experience a decrease in their sense of belonging over the course of a semester (as was observed in their untreated peers), and that these students comparatively increase their odds of achieving a passing grade on engineering programming assignments by 80%. Findings also include that treated BLI students report a more integrated sense of engineering identity that embraces their racial and gender identities in comparison to others and that treated BLI students are retained in engineering at higher rates. The low cost and scalability of our intervention may contribute to large-scale transformations in engineering education.
Coauthors
Allison Godwin, Cornell University; Matthew Bahnson, Purdue University; Eric McChesney, University of Pittsburgh; Kevin Binning, University of Pittsburgh; Natascha Buswell, University of California, Irvine; Erica McGreevy, University of Pittsburgh; Chris Schunn, University of Pittsburgh; Gerard Dovre-Lewis, University of Pittsburgh; Liwei Chen, University of Pittsburgh; Beverly Conrique, University of Pittsburgh; Carlie Cooper, University of Georgia; Charlie Diaz, University of Pittsburgh; Ketura Elie, University of Pittsburgh; Rachel Forester, University of Pittsburgh; Kevin Kaufman-Ortiz, Purdue University; Danielle Lewis, University of Pittsburgh
