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

  1. A sense of belonging, especially class belonging, is related to behavioral and emotional engagement among undergraduate STEM students.
  2. Belonging represents a distinct attribute that reflects the experiences of students in the STEM environment and has implications for what they do in class (effort and participation) and how they feel about their experiences in class and their major (positive and negative emotions).These results hold regardless of gender.
  3. 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.
  4. Major belonging was a significant factor related to engagement at only three of the institutions and primarily for effort and positive emotional engagement. These institutions were quite varied in terms of the size of the student body and the types of academic majors offered. In each case, however, either the small size of the academic units or cohort programs within the majors could have contributed to the importance of the major as a mechanism for encouraging a sense of belonging.
  5. It was only at the large research institution that university belonging was a consistent contributor to engagement.
  6. Self-efficacy also emerged as a central variable related to different types of engagement in that there was a consistent pattern of significant relationships across the five institutions.
  7. Mixed patterns of connection between self-efficacy and more positive forms of engagement (effort, participation, and positive emotion) suggest that institutional factors may play a stronger role in how students choose to engage more in their studies.
  8. 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.