College of Science
90 How Students Describe their Belonging Uncertainty in General Chemistry 1
Rebecca MacGillvray and Regina Frey
Faculty Mentor: Regina Frey (Chemistry, University of Utah)
This study seeks to understand how undergraduates describe their social belonging within General Chemistry 1, specifically, students’ belonging uncertainty within the course. While social belonging envelopes the terms belonging uncertainty and sense of belonging, belonging uncertainty refers to the lack of a robust feeling of acceptance within a specific group. Previous findings led by the Frey group discovered high belonging uncertainty can not only negatively affect students’ performance but may also influence them to not pursue future STEM courses. For this study in particular, belonging uncertainty relates to the question: Do people like me belong in this course?
We seek to uncover the reason behind students’ levels of belonging uncertainty by utilizing a Likert scale survey that was previously distributed to students taking General Chemistry 1 at the University of Utah. The survey is sent to students twice in the semester where they can rate their social belonging based on how much they agree with the different survey questions. Within the Frey group, we are currently looking at question five which allows students to also elaborate on their response to the statement: I feel uncertain about my belonging in CHEM 1210. To understand the dominating topics affecting belonging uncertainty, hundreds of student responses have been separated into categories created with specific definitions. The categories that have been created for question five include course environment, course structure, student-student relationship, student-instructor relationship, identity, perceived ability, quality of performance, chemistry value, nonspecific, and non- codable. In time, these overarching themes can be used to develop interventions that harbor high social belonging in the classroom.