Collaborative Research: Research Initiation: Identifying longitudinal trends in psychological safety and correlation with sense of belonging and success beliefs

About This Grant

This project will address the critical need of educating and graduating more engineers to meet state and national workforce needs. Retaining undergraduate engineering students can be challenging. One factor that may help with the retention of engineering students is increased psychological safety on engineering teams. Psychological safety is the shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking without fear of repercussions. Psychological safety can improve teamwork and may be linked with sense of belonging and expectations of success for engineering students, which are two key constructs linked with the retention in engineering. This project will advance our knowledge on how first-year students’ psychological safety changes in engineering teams over a two-semester course sequence. We will also investigate how psychological safety relates to their feelings of belonging and belief in their ability to succeed in engineering. By documenting trends in psychological safety over time and its connection to belonging and expectations of success, this project will suggest key times during students’ first year where psychological safety may drop, thus identifying ideal times for educational interventions to improve psychological safety. It will also help us to better understand links between psychological safety, belonging, and expectations of success over time, leading to improved first-year educational experiences for engineering undergraduates. This work aligns with the Research Initiation in Engineering Formation program in understanding the formation and evolution of psychological safety, belonging, and expectations of success in undergraduates over time and in expanding the engineering education research network through the mentoring and development of the principal investigator. This project will conduct a longitudinal cohort study of first-year engineering students at the University of Arkansas. The study will use a convergent mixed methods design to address three research questions: (1) How does psychological safety fluctuate throughout a two-semester introduction to engineering course? (2) How does psychological safety relate to first-year students’ sense of belonging and expectations of success over time? And (3) Are there differential effects of psychological safety on sense of belonging and expectations of success in engineering? Data will be collected through a survey using validated measures for psychological safety, sense of belonging, and expectations of success, along with open-ended responses to provide depth on student experiences in first-year courses. Students will respond to the survey four times per semester for a total of eight times during the project. Quantitative data will be analyzed using multilevel modeling, which accommodates the nested data structure where time is nested within students within teams. This will allow us to capture changes in psychological safety over time, to evaluate the relationship between psychological safety, sense of belonging, and expectations of success, and to evaluate whether there are differential effects of psychological safety on sense of belonging and expectations of success. Qualitative data will be analyzed using thematic analysis to explore potential reasons for changes in psychological safety over time and examine why psychological safety, belonging, and expectations of success may be related. The intellectual merit of this work lies in identifying trends in psychological safety over time in engineering education, which may allow us to identify key points in time to incorporate interventions to increase psychological safety. The work will also clarify possible relationships between psychological safety, sense of belonging, and expectations of success in engineering. Broader impacts of this work include improving first-year experiences for engineering undergraduates, improving retention of students at the University of Arkansas, where retention rates are below the national average, and developing the STEM workforce by retaining and educating more engineers broadly. This work will be shared through publications, conference presentations, and workshops for faculty involved in first-year engineering programs. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.