STEM Seniors: Strong Connections to Community Are Associated with Identity and Positive Affect in the Classroom

We recently developed a conceptual model that emphasized that STEM students’ connections to campus communities mediate (facilitate) academic engagement and subsequently influence the students’ identification with their discipline and positive affect (feelings) toward it. Thus, the model suggests that a student’s connection to community indirectly links to identification and affect. The links are indirect but important as the engineering education community discusses what is necessary in educating engineers. It has been shown elsewhere that if we want our graduates to contribute to the engineering community of practice then we must consider the interdependencies among community, learning and identity. This conceptual model will aid in that consideration. We have just completed the first year of a multi-year, multi-university study to develop, test and understand the implications of this conceptual model. In the first year, we developed a pilot survey tool and surveyed a total of 287 students, most of whom were seniors, majoring in engineering, math and computer science at five disparate universities. The goal of the pilot survey was to test the survey tool and to accomplish preliminary assessment of the indirect impact of connection to community on both identification with the discipline and affect toward learning it. Thus, the survey included items to measure the STEM students’ sense of professional identity, affect toward learning their discipline and their connection to community (sense of belonging, support, etc.) at the following levels: individual courses, academic major and the larger institution. This paper presents these survey items and the relevant results from our pilot survey. Our pilot survey results indicate which measures of professional identity and affect are most relevant for this effort. Further, these preliminary results reveal a strong Pearson correlation (r = 0.50) between career identity and connection to academic major as well as between affect and connection to academic major (r = 0.56). There are somewhat smaller correlations to a specific classroom community (r = 0.41 and r = 0.39), and still significant, but even smaller, correlations to the larger institution (r = 0.32 and r = 0.25). Thus, students connections to academic major communities and classrooms appears to be related to the students’ professional identities and affect toward learning those professions. In subsequent years, our team will modify our survey instrument based on these preliminary findings and seek to validate the various interconnections in our conceptual model. We will look for trends corresponding to institution type as well as gender and ethnic diversity. At the same time, we will determine the qualities of the communities that best facilitate academic engagement. Eventually, we will determine how to create communities with these qualities across the broad range of higher education institutions involved in engineering education.