A new study led by Indiana University researchers finds that incoming students who participated in an online membership exercise completed their first year as full-time college students at a higher rate than their peers, but only when their institution had with robust strategies and resources to support belonging for diverse learners.
Led by the College Transition Collaborative and IU Equity Accelerator, the research team offered a brief online reading and writing exercise to nearly 27,000 students from 22 diverse colleges and universities across the United States in the fall of 2015 and 2016, including IU. These results, the nation’s largest multisite randomized controlled trial of this pertaining intervention, were published May 5 in Science.
“There are hundreds of thousands of students who are left behind and are not supported by institutions in the way that they need to be supported,” said Mary Murphy, founder of IU Equity Accelerator, professor of brain and psychological sciences and Herman Professor B Wells from the class of 1948 at the IU Bloomington College of Arts and Sciences. “Equity Accelerator is helping institutions understand what they can do to help students feel like they belong, that they are supported academically.
“It is important that students never feel alone and that the institution provide tangible opportunities that students recognize and use to help them feel a sense of belonging and succeed academically in college.”
The researchers found significant effects on students’ persistence, course taking, and sense of belonging after participating in the reading and writing exercise. The intervention increased the rate at which students completed their first year of college as full-time students, especially among students in groups that had historically progressed at lower rates. However, across all 22 institutions, the impacts were much greater when institutions had strategies and resources to help students feel like they belonged.
The researchers have calculated that their results can be generalized to more than 1 million students annually at 749 four-year colleges and universities in the United States, where the 12-month dropout rate for undergraduate freshmen is 24 .1 percent, according to the Educational Data Initiative. If all schools in the generalization sample implemented the online social belonging intervention, an additional 12,136 full-time students would complete their first year of college each year. The benefits are greatest among historically underperforming groups (students whose combination of race/ethnicity and generational status is historically underperforming at a particular institution), helping to reduce inequality on campus.
The social belonging intervention was delivered through an online module in the summer before students started college, typically as part of a pre-semester checklist of necessary forms and requirements. It included survey results of older students showing that everyday concerns about belonging are normal in the transition to college and may improve over time; carefully selected stories from older students describing these concerns and how they got better from them; and an opportunity to reflect on these stories in writing.
Results varied among the 22 institutions, as each offers different strategies, resources, and programs to support particular groups of students who historically struggle to complete their first year of college. The researchers say that institutional transformation and increased support for students on campus, as well as student knowledge, attitudes, and use of these resources, are critical to improving student success.
“This work is globally reimagining the role of institutions in student outcomes, not just from an academic perspective, but also in student life outcomes,” said Sara Woodruff, director of strategy at IU Equity Accelerator. “This is a call to action on the ways that institutions are taking their power and using it to really move students. Through the Equity Accelerator, we are helping institutions re-examine the contract they are creating with students, helping them call out the inequalities that exist and tell them in real, granular terms what they can do to change.”
IU Equity Accelerator, formed in July 2022, is a focused research organization whose mission is to use and apply the behavioral and social sciences to provide more equitable learning and work environments where everyone can reach their full potential. Institutions across the country that are working to improve student membership can work with Equity Accelerator to identify, from their own students’ perspectives, what resources and strategies are needed to facilitate student ownership on campus.
“When addressing equity, it’s important to have actionable outcomes that can be used to improve student experiences and outcomes and help make them the people they’re meant to be,” Murphy said. “We hope that institutions can take advantage of our findings and the work of the IU Equity Accelerator to identify better ways to support their students.”
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