(366f) Sense of Belonging within Chemical Engineering and Its Impacts upon Retention

This is a project examining chemical engineering identity and its relation to student retention and persistence. Chemical engineering is a strenuous discipline, filled with challenging academic coursework, difficult problems to focus upon post graduation within professional careers, and rigorous internal standards in chemical engineering classrooms and societies. Furthermore, within engineering educational settings often there is a celebration of suffering, a culture of embracing the struggles of the program from the students. This is not only prevalent in chemical engineering, it is accentuated due to the amount of chemistry courses necessitated in most degree programs. It is known that retention rates within engineering programs in the USA struggle, disproportionately affecting minoritized groups, underrepresented groups, and students belonging to a lower socioeconomic status. These include women, LGBTQIA students, and students of non-white identitiy.

It is known that identity and belonging can be major intangible factors influencing retention and resilience within academic or professional contexts. However, little work has been done on students' sense of belonging within chemical engineering or their internal identity as an engineer and how it relates to their resilience or persistence within the program. When students struggle with the rigor of the programs, often they are at risk or placed upon academic probation. Academic probation is a primarily punitive measure, often rocking the identity of students placed upon probation or at risk of probation.

Consequently, we want to investigate how identity and belonging relate to persistence and retention of chemical engineering students who are academically “at risk”, as defined by being on or at risk of being placed upon academic probation, or “struggling”, by self identification. We define persistence and retention as continuing through the semester, specifically continuing through the program to the third year, or 5th semester consecutively.

We conducted interviews with chemical engineering students who fit our criteria of being on academic probation or self-identifying as struggling within the program, seeking to understand their identity and whether there was a sense of belonging within their academic program, and how that related to their willingness to persist/work to get off of probation and achieve within the remainder of their program. The students we interviewed were at least 2nd semester, and we examined qualitatively the data of these interviews as well as the metrics of how many of our participants continued in the program the following year/semester. This data will be analyzed through thematic coding(1), examining how students consider their identity and their feelings of belonging within the academic program via the metric developed within Godwin’s (2016) facets of identity within engineering (2).

We expect the implications of this study to be potential ramifications on retention, specifically of those currently underrepresented groups noted earlier, within chemical engineering, and can be a justification for programs to improve sense of belonging and foster engineering identity within students.

1. V. Braun and V. Clarke, “Using thematic analysis in psychology,” Qualitative Research in Psychology, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 77–101, Jan. 2006, doi: 10.1191/1478088706qp063oa.
2. A. Godwin, “The Development of a Measure of Engineering Identity,” in 2016 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition Proceedings, New Orleans, Louisiana, Jun. 2016, p. 26122. doi: 10.18260/p.26122.