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Incoming college students who completed a 30-minute online exercise intended to bolster their sense of belonging were more likely to complete their first year of college while enrolled full time, according to a groundbreaking paper published in Science Thursday.
The study involved 26,911 students at 22 diverse four-year institutions across the country, and it has the potential to help students at a variety of colleges, at little cost. Students in identity groups — based on race or ethnicity and first-generation college status — that have historically struggled more to complete the first year of college at any given institution benefitted the most from the exercise.
The social-belonging intervention improved first-year retention among students in identity groups who reported feeling medium to high levels of belonging. For example, among students whose identity groups historically struggled to complete the first year of college and who also reported medium to high levels of belonging — the group that benefitted most from the activity — the exercise increased the proportion that completed their first year of college while enrolled full time from 57.2 percent to 59.3 percent.
But for the 15 percent of students whose identity groups experienced low levels of belonging at their institutions, the exercise did not improve retention rates, indicating that colleges will have to work harder to help those students.
Higher-education leaders have devoted more resources and attention to improving sense of belonging in recent years in an effort to help students from diverse backgrounds feel welcome on campus and to improve student success.
Researchers have long known that college students’ sense of belonging is critically linked to outcomes such as persistence, engagement, and mental health. But it can be difficult to measure the specific impact of efforts to improve belonging in a college setting. More recent research has focused on what colleges can do to improve sense of belonging on campus.
For the Science study, incoming first-year students in 2015 and 2016 spent up to half an hour in the summer before starting college completing an online module on belonging. They read about a survey of older students that showed many had experienced feeling homesick, having trouble finding a lab partner, or having difficulty interacting with professors, for example. The survey explained that those feelings are normal and can improve over time. Next, the students read curated stories from older students describing how such worries eventually got better. The incoming students were then asked to write about their reflections on the stories to help future students.
The study, which has 37 authors, was conducted by the College Transition Collaborative, a partnership of researchers and practitioners who study ways to support belonging, growth, and equity in college settings. It’s now known as the Equity Accelerator.
Gregory M. Walton, a professor of psychology at Stanford University and the lead author of the study, said the exercise works by giving students a hopeful map for the transition to college. For students who belong to groups that have struggled historically, the roadmap can provide a buffer when they hit inevitable bumps in their college career. While some students can more easily shrug off such challenges, students from underrepresented minority groups and first-generation college students are more likely to interpret them as evidence that they do not belong in college, which can negatively affect motivation and persistence. The intervention appears to provide a boost to students who have reflected on other students experiencing similar difficulties and getting through them.
“The fact that it’s effective across these widely generalizable sample institutions is incredibly important,” Walton said. “Everybody should be doing this in some form.”
Previous studies have shown similar interventions to be effective, but on a smaller scale. One such study found that an hourlong activity focused on struggles to fit in during the transition to college increased the grades of Black students over the next three years and reduced the gap in grade point averages between Black and white students by 52 percent.
But by showing that the recent social-belonging intervention is effective at a variety of colleges across the country, including public and private colleges with admission rates ranging from 6 percent to 90 percent, the study demonstrates that such exercises are potentially scalable. The authors estimate that if the social-belonging activity were implemented at 749 four-year institutions across the United States that share key characteristics with the 22 colleges in the study, an additional 12,136 students, out of about one million new students, would complete their first year of college enrolled as full-time students.
The social-belonging exercise is available for free to four-year colleges in the United States and Canada here.
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