Status: ACTIVE
Priority Area: Psychology of Student Success, Teaching & Curricular Innovation
Population: Undergraduates in large gateway STEM courses
Delivery: Instructor-led in-class exercise at the beginning of term
Mechanism: Social belonging, identity safety, classroom norms
Different courses and disciplines create different sources of belonging uncertainty. While some STEM fields can produce a “chilly climate” for women (e.g., physics, engineering, computer science), others may create uncertainty along racial or ethnic lines (e.g., biology). The ecological belonging intervention approach tailors in-class exercises to the specific sources of belonging uncertainty within each course.
Working with individual instructors, the UBelong Collaborative team designs brief exercises that change classroom norms about the meaning of adversity and belonging in that particular course. Instructors deliver these exercises at the beginning of the term, helping students reframe common struggles as a normal part of the learning process rather than evidence that they don’t belong.
Key Findings
Results to date show that the intervention closed the ethnicity gap in Biology and the gender gap in Physics courses. The first studies using this ecological approach were published in Binning et al. (2020). Efforts to scale this approach across additional courses at Pitt are ongoing.
Data Visualizations
[from current Belonging Interventions page with updated alt text]
Related Resources
- Materials for Ecological Intervention (OSF)
- Classroom Practices for Pitt Community slides [link to Resources & Tools]
Key People: Kevin Binning, Chandralekha Singh, Erica McGreevy, Nancy Kaufmann, Linda DeAngelo