Poster Q20 - Improvement in Students' Sense of Belonging through Student-Faculty Lunches: An Equity Analysis

Introduction: The impact of student-faculty interaction has shown to increase persistence, improve sense of belonging, and increase engagement. To facilitate students’ sense of belonging, we implemented monthly student-faculty lunches at no cost to the students and faculty. This program, proven to significantly benefit students’ senses of belonging in our previous study, has been successfully administered for 13 months and has enrolled more than 40 students, with the demographic breakdown of the participants being similar to the makeup of students in the BME department.

However, previous studies have indicated that such interventions may be less efficacious for female students and ethnic minorities. To ensure that we are serving our female, non-binary, and ethnic minority students with our student-faculty lunches, we would like to quantify the impact of the demographic factors on the outcomes from these lunches. Throughout the study, self-reported demographic information was collected from the students to determine if demographic characteristics had an impact on the level of improvement indicated by the students. Additional factors including class standing and the time period of the event were analyzed as well. In this work, we report the results from demographic analysis in the student-faculty lunches.

Materials and

Methods: Our study enrolled 43 non-graduating BME undergraduates to have lunch with a BME faculty member. Each lunch paired 3 to 5 students with a faculty member based on interests indicated through a recruitment survey. To be eligible for the lunch, students completed an anonymous pre-intervention survey including 8 Likert-scale questions (1=strongly disagree; 5=strongly agree) and demographic information. Horizontally tracked post-surveys containing the same Likert-scale questions were issued immediately after the lunch and one month after the lunch to assess the impact of the lunch. The 8 Likert-scale questions covered areas of belonging including knowledge and satisfaction of events, self-efficacy, sense of belonging in department, clarity of career goals, and knowledge of diversity, equity, inclusion (DEI). Our study was approved by UC Davis IRB as an exempt study (IRB # 2030008-3).

To gain more insight into the efficacy of our lunches across the recorded demographic subgroups and deduce potential guidelines for implementing programs facilitating student-faculty micro-interactions, we analyzed the responses of the Likert scale questions from our lunches using regression analysis. A multiple linear regression (MLR) model, using class standing, gender, ethnicity, and time of event (fall/winter/spring quarter) as independent variables, was generated. In the scope of this study, we performed statistical analyses on only the pre-survey and the immediate post-survey. The significance level of the slopes was selected as 0.05 in our study.

Results, Conclusions, and Discussions: 41 (93.2%) valid responses were collected from the immediate post survey. Breakdown of survey responses on gender and ethnic identities are included in the figures. Our intervention narrowed existing gaps in certain questions in our survey, especially in our ethnic minority and female students. The coefficient of ethnic minority students in satisfaction of events (–1.0472, p=0.018 to –0.8165, p=0.030) and clarity of academic plan (–1.0723, p=0.027 to –0.8395, p=0.019) improved from the pre-survey to the post-survey. Gaps between female and male students in strengths and weaknesses within major reduced from –0.8423 (p=0.013) to –0.5443 (p=0.036), while the coefficient in white students improved from –1.6036 (p=0.006) to –0.9166 (p=0.036). We also found reduced coefficients in class standing as a variable in the strengths and weaknesses (0.5487, p=0.003 to 0.2338, p=0.083) and in intention to graduate from the BME major (0.4729, p=0.002 to 0.0975, p=0.377).

However, suboptimal improvements on certain demographic subgroups have been found in our data as well. Although the sense of belonging within the female students significantly improved after the lunch (p < 0.01), isolated coefficients of sense of belonging in female students lowered after the lunch, regressing from 0.2178 (p=0.458) to –0.3595 (p=0.040). We also found in the post survey that white and Asian students had lower perceived knowledge in DEI.

Time of the year is not a significant predictor of the outcome on any of the questions. Therefore, similar effectiveness can be expected for these programs implemented at any point in the academic year. With a reduction in the coefficients in class standing, we suggest that interventions, if performed, should be done early for better impact in fostering a more inclusive and supportive academic environments for all students. These improvements were less pronounced among gender and ethnic minorities, thus motivating the need for tailored strategies to support these groups, although our intervention has proven to close existing gaps in sense of belonging. We also recommend DEI-related topics to be integrated into these events for better DEI outcomes. Our future work, which will comprise of individual interviews and additional lunches, will explore strategies to better serve marginalized groups.

Acknowledgements (Optional): This work is funded by the Health, Equity, and Wellness Committee of the Biomedical Engineering department; the Undergraduate Research Center TAF23-01 grant; and the Provost’s Undergraduate Fellowship grant PF23-42 at University of California, Davis.

The authors would like to thank Tate Chatfield, Eileen Panguito, Megan Villasenor, Dr. Marc Facciotti, Dr. Steven George, Dr. Yi Xue, Dr. Soichiro Yamada, Dr. Emilie Roncali, Dr. Jennifer Choi, Dr. Angelique Louie, Dr. Jinhwan Kim, Dr. Audrey Fan, and Dr. Aidan Gilchrist for their support in these lunches.