Resumen de A cross-sectional study of belonging in engineering communities
Denise M. Wilson, Philip Bell, Diane Jones, Lisa Hansen
Few research efforts in engineering education study the impact of affect on student experience. However, a substantial number ofinterventions, research centers, and similar organized efforts seek to improve the strength and cohesiveness of the community in whichthe student spends a substantial part of his or her time. Belonging and the related affective sense of connection to community areviewed implicitly in these efforts as a positive attribute of the intervention, yet rarely are these improvements explicitly measured. Thiswork reports the results of the sense of belonging (and community) of students within a variety of engineering education venues, usingmeasures that have been previously validated in K-12 educational venues and whose validity is confirmed for the higher education,engineering populations studied herein. Differences between the local (immediate) community and the larger community to which theengineering student or faculty belongs have been analyzed in conjunction with the sense of belonging experienced by engineers in fiveacademic venues including conferences, classrooms, and retreats. Overall, the results show that an engineering sense of belonging ishighest in local (immediate) venues in which community building is part of the venue mission (along with transformative goals forengineering research education), but lowest in undergraduate engineering classrooms. The sense of belonging in the larger community towhich the engineer belongs tends to be highest for faculty, then graduate students, then undergraduate students. Sense of belonging isalso highly correlated to the psychological sense of community (PSC), technical competence, and feelings of being socially at ease.Faculty-student relatedness, a major player in student fulfillment, is less correlated to belonging but still (moderately) related.
