The Sense of Belonging Quotient: Relating Sense of Belonging to Predictors of Scientific Civic Engagement and Science Identity in Civically Engaged Curricula

Civic engagement involves an individual's proactive participation in a community to improve its socioeconomic conditions. Scientific civic engagement (SCE) is a variant where students use their scientific expertise to achieve similar effects. Various factors, including family, community, peer groups, and education, influence an individual's likelihood of SCE. In undergraduate biology, civic engagement is sometimes integrated into courses through community-engaged projects or CUREs (Course-based undergraduate research experiences). Investigations into these courses have shown positive outcomes, such as students feeling a greater Sense of belonging to the communities they civically engage with in the course and expressing intentions to pursue more SCE in the future. However, limited research explains how students' PRE-course Sense of Belonging to the communities students civically engage with during a course affects these outcomes. Our study found that students' PRE-course Sense of Belonging to the communities with which they were expected to civically engage during a course significantly predicted their outcomes in civically engaged biology courses and CUREs. This highlights questions regarding the choice of these communities by instructors and how incoming identities students hold, that do or do not align with the communities with which they are expected to engage, might influence students' science civic engagement outcomes.