A Belonging Intervention to Improve STEM Outcomes for Women and Underrepresented Students: A Randomized Controlled Trial at 22 Colleges

Indiana University, Bloomington IN

Investigators

Abstract

This project consists of a large randomized-controlled trial (RCT) of a social psychological intervention with college students. The social-belonging intervention seeks to normalize the students' experience of struggle in the transition to college and provides productive strategies to help students perceive initial challenges with adjustment as relatively commonplace and not indicative of a lack of belonging. The project examines the experimental effects of the belonging intervention on the achievement and retention of underrepresented students in STEM courses and majors with more than 40,000 students across 22 colleges and universities. The project will explore how the effects of the belonging intervention vary based on the situational cues in students? local STEM settings and the visibility of those cues. It examines the experimental effects of the intervention on STEM persistence and performance (e.g., STEM grades, majoring, retention and graduation) among several stigmatized and underrepresented groups: women, underrepresented students of color, first-generation students, students with disabilities, and English-language learners. STEM majors and courses appear to constitute more threatening contexts for underrepresented groups than do other majors; yet they also offer opportunities for higher-paying jobs and contributions to the U.S. STEM workforce. Therefore, this project will focus on enhancing STEM persistence and performance among underrepresented groups through examination of the situational cues that engender identity threat and the experimental investigation of an identity-threat reducing intervention. In a randomized controlled trial with over 40,000 first-year students at 22 colleges, this project will investigate how students from STEM-underrepresented groups (i.e., women, racial/ethnic minorities, first-generation college students, students with disabilities, and English-language learners) are affected by situational cues that signal their group may not be valued or expected to succeed in STEM settings. These feelings of social identity threat have been shown in decades of past research to negatively shape students' experiences of college, depress academic performance and persistence, and cause students to question their belonging in STEM and in college more generally. The researchers will assess the effectiveness of a large-scale pre-matriculation belonging intervention in improving the academic persistence and performance of students in STEM classes and fields. The treatment communicates that adversity and feelings of non-belonging are normative and temporary experiences in the transition to college that can improve by adopting productive social and academic strategies. The project will also investigate the boundary conditions of cue-induced identity threat by examining how STEM academic success is moderated by situational cues (e.g., numerical representation among students and faculty), and the visibility of the cues (e.g., whether such representation is easily assessed, as among women, or more difficult to assess, as among students with learning disabilities). The researchers will investigate how these effects play out in both broad-access and more selective colleges and among groups that past research has shown are affected by identity-threatening situational cues in STEM and who have shown improved outcomes from social-psychological interventions in STEM and non-STEM contexts.