Research Initiation: Understanding the Impact of Institutional Supports on the Motivation, Belonging, Identity Development, and Persistence of Engineering Students

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Educating a diverse, creative, engaged, and skilled cohort of engineering students is the central mission of undergraduate engineering programs. Achieving this mission is essential to providing the engineering workforce of the future. Unfortunately, persistence of engineering students to graduation remains undesirably low, despite the programs and resources that universities and colleges of engineering put in place to support students' success. This project examines whether and how students' use of these institutional resources enhances their persistence and success as engineering students. Knowledge and insights gained from this research will improve the ability of institutions to design their programs to maximize the benefits to their student population. The project investigates academic and co-curricular factors associated with students' engineering identity, their sense of belonging in college, and their engineering-related motivation. Drawing from a longitudinal dataset tracking undergraduates from the start of college through graduation, the project considers: i) how the use of institutional supports predicts students' engineering-related motivation, belonging, and identity development over time, ii) how the use of institutional supports predicts persistence, and iii) whether the effects on persistence are mediated through changes in students' psychological processes. The results of this work will inform the field about the underlying mechanisms associated with persistence, providing much needed insights into the reasons why these institutional supports may (or may not) be effective, with direct application to the future development of institutional supports that more effectively support persistence. An examination of whether certain institutional support structures are particularly helpful to specific groups (e.g., by gender, race/ethnicity, first-generation college student) will provide valuable, generalizable insights for targeted retention efforts.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.