Measuring students' class-level sense of belonging: A social-network-based approach

Abstract

Social interaction with peers has long been recognized as one of the critical factors for facilitating the learning process. Extant studies have investigated the impact of social ties and structural network position on academic performance and find that social ties are positively associated with academic performance. Social ties are important to construction engineering which highlights interpersonal collaborations in construction projects. However, little to no research has shed light on the impact of social ties on students' sense of belonging at the class level. The objective of this paper is to develop a social-network-analysis (SNA) based measurement that can be used to assess a student's class-level belonging. In reaching such a goal, the authors distribute a survey to multiple construction classes across multiple institutions in the United States. Data (N=70) are collected to verify the performance of the measurement in assessing class-level sense of belonging. Results show that the measurement is highly reliable and consistent across demographic attributes including gender, race, ethnicity, and academic grade through cross-validation while being sensitive to different classes. Results reveal that white students often have a higher sense of class belonging than their African American classmates. Results also identify a significant relationship between a student's class-level belonging and his/her group-level network centrality. The findings imply that a student who has a more central position in a study group may not have a higher sense of class belonging. Further, the findings suggest that SNA-based measurement is able to assess a student's sense of class belonging.