May 11, 2023
A multi-site trial of an online belonging exercise improved first-year college students' academic persistence, but only when their institution had strong strategies and resources in place to support diverse students' belonging.
Getting to college is one thing. But staying there is another altogether. It can be one of the most exciting times of students' lives. It can also be stressful, lonely, and confusing. While the stress of attending college is felt by most, it is not felt equally by all. Students from historically marginalized and excluded populations tend to experience higher-than-average stress and uncertainty, which can undermine academic performance, achievement, and retention.
A new study finds that incoming students who participated in an online belonging exercise completed their first year as full-time college students at a higher rate than their peers. The research team, including Pitt's Omid Fotuhi, a Research Associate at the Learning Research and Development Center (LRDC), offered a brief online belonging exercise to nearly 27,000 students from 22 diverse colleges and universities across the United States in fall 2015 and 2016.The results were published May 5 in Science.
"The core idea behind the belonging exercise," says Fotuhi, "is that a student's perspective on adversity is malleable. Students with belonging uncertainty may see common hurdles for example, an unexpectedly bad grade as evidence that they do not belong. "Instead of seeing adversity as unique to them and permanent, we try to train students that experiencing adversity is common, if not universal, and temporary," he explains.
The intervention was administered online to students at the start of the term. First, students saw results of a survey of older students about how worries about belonging were normal and improved over time. Then, they read person narratives from diverse students about their worries about belonging and what helped them. Finally, students were asked to reflect on these stories and write an essay for future students about belonging concerns, how they are normal, and how they improve over time.
Rather than compare students by single, broad categories - such as African-American or first-generation, the students were categorized by "local-identity groups": students of a given race-ethnicity, with a given first-generation status, at a given college, in a given cohort. This approach allowed the researchers to study the nuances of identity and belonging in different college settings.
Across the 22 institutions, the impacts were much greater when the institutions had strategies and resources in place to help students feel like they belong. Belonging affordances can vary as a function of classroom practices, institutional messaging, and campus culture. Other affordances are the opportunity for high quality intergroup interactions on campus in residence halls, courses, and community spaces, and the availability of mentors who can help direct students' academic trajectories.
Led by the College Transition Collaborative, the study is the country's largest multi-site randomized controlled trial of the belonging intervention, and an example of "team science." The past half-century has witnessed a dramatic increase in the scale and complexity of scientific research, which is increasingly conducted by small teams and larger groups rather than individual investigators. The growing scale of science has been accompanied by a shift toward collaborative research, referred to as team science.
The findings have policy implications for academic institutions that strive to better support and retain diverse students. Addressing and alleviating students' belonging uncertainty during the transition to college can set all students up for long-term success, particularly students from historically marginalized and excluded populations, but only when their institution has strong strategies and resources in place to support diverse students' belonging.
In recognition of the social and academic challenges associated with transitioning to college, Pitt joined the College Transition Collaborative in 2015, and in 2019 launched the Pitt Transition Study (PTS). Read about PTS and other Pitt Student Success initiatives here.
Walton, G.M., et al. (2023). Where and with whom does a brief social-belonging intervention promote progress in college? Science. 380,499-505.
Pittwire published a version of this article, "One key to success in college? A sense of belonging, according to new research" on June 9, 2023.
Read more about the CTC study from collaborators, Stanford University "Improving student success through social belonging," and Indiana University's "Multi-site trial of belonging exercise improves college students' academic persistence."
An online version of the intervention is available to colleges and universities for free through the College Transition Collaborative and the Project for Education Research that Scales (PERTS).