Partners:
- Learning Research and Development Center (LRDC)
- Department of Physics
- Department of Biological Sciences
- Swanson School of Engineering
Priority Areas:
- Psychology of Student Success
- Teaching and Curricular Innovation
The UBelongCollaborative is a research-practice partnership focused on scaling ecological belonging interventions across Pitt's gateway courses. Led by Kevin Binning at LRDC, the collaborative works directly with course instructors to design and deliver brief in-class exercises that change classroom norms about the meaning of adversity and belonging.
The approach is built on a key insight: different courses and different disciplines create different sources of belonging uncertainty. While some STEM fields can produce a "chilly climate" for women (for example, some physics and engineering courses), others may generate uncertainty along racial or ethnic lines (for example, some biology courses). Rather than applying a one-size-fits-all intervention, the UBelong team tailors each exercise to address the specific identity threats present in that course's ecology. This "ecological" approach—matching the intervention to the context—is what distinguishes UBelong from generic belonging programs.
Results to date have been striking: the intervention closed the ethnicity gap in Biology and the gender gap in Physics. Intervention students showed higher attendance, better course grades, and stronger one-year college persistence compared to business-as-usual controls. These findings were published in Psychological Science (Binning et al., 2020) and have informed a National Science Foundation-funded effort to adapt the approach for engineering education at scale.
The UBelong team continues to expand into new courses and disciplines at Pitt. Every incoming undergraduate now encounters some version of this work during their first year, making UBelong one of the largest course-level belonging interventions at any research university in the country.
Key People: Kevin Binning (LRDC), Linda DeAngelo, Chandralekha Singh (Physics), Erica McGreevy, Nancy Kaufmann, Chris Schunn, Natasha Buswell
Key Publication: Binning, K. R., et al. (2020). Changing social contexts to foster equity in college science courses: An ecological-belonging intervention. Psychological Science, 31(9), 1059-1070.
Related Interventions: Ecological Belonging Interventions (In-Class)