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Belonging and Academic Engagement Among Undergraduate STEM Students: A Multi-institutional Study

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Abstract

This study examined the links between multiple levels of belonging and forms of behavioral and emotional engagement among STEM undergraduates in five geographically and culturally distinct institutions in the United States. Data were gathered from a survey specifically designed to capture the links between these key elements of the undergraduate experience. Results from over 1500 student participants in the survey clearly supported the importance of belonging for behavioral and emotional engagement in STEM courses when measured in the context of the classroom. The most consistent and significant links among models for the five participating institutions occurred between belonging at the class level and positive emotional engagement, while the least frequent and least consistent occurred between belonging to the university and all forms of engagement. Patterns of association to engagement were also similar for belonging and self-efficacy. The results of this study confirm the importance of belonging in the STEM classroom context and provide additional insights into the concurrent importance of self-efficacy in supporting student engagement. These results also demonstrate that belonging is a distinct attribute related to engagement and is not simply reducible to feelings of self-efficacy.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to gratefully acknowledge the National Science Foundation for their support of this work under the REESE program (Grant numbers DRL-0909817, 0910143, 0909659, 0909900, and 0909850). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, 98195, USA

    Denise Wilson

  2. College of Education, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, 98195, USA

    Diane Jones, Fraser Bocell, Joy Crawford & Mee Joo Kim

  3. Department of Mathematics, Statistics & Computer Science, Boston, MA, 02115, USA

    Nanette Veilleux

  4. Department of Chemical Engineering, Tuskegee University, Tuskegee, AL, 36088, USA

    Tamara Floyd-Smith

  5. Department of Computer Science, Minnesota State University, Mankato, Mankato, MN, 56001, USA

    Rebecca Bates

  6. School of Engineering, Seattle Pacific University, Seattle, WA, 98119-1957, USA

    Melani Plett

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  1. Denise Wilson
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Correspondence to Denise Wilson.

Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11.

Table 7 Correlation table for the private university
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Table 8 Correlation table for historically black university
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Table 9 Correlation table for women’s college
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Table 10 Correlation table for teaching university
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Table 11 Correlation table for research university
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Wilson, D., Jones, D., Bocell, F. et al. Belonging and Academic Engagement Among Undergraduate STEM Students: A Multi-institutional Study. Res High Educ 56, 750–776 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-015-9367-x

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