Motivate Lab: Student Voices Initiative

Project Status: Monitor/Assess

The Student Voices Initiative centers student-led focus groups to examine students' sense of academic and social belonging at PSU and other higher education institutions and provides recommendations for system-change, with a particular focus on supporting historically marginalized student groups.

Motivate Lab at the University of Virginia is providing us with light-touch support to train the PSU project team to implement the Student Voices Initiative protocol, code and analyze the data, and identify themes to understand salient opportunity structures (e.g., aspects of the college environment that either thwart or enhance their sense of belonging) that can be addressed by incorporating the student perspective.

Accomplished

End of Project report completed.
Submitted a manuscript based on the project “Undergraduate Student Belonging at an Urban Public Access Higher Education Institution: The Importance of Social Connections” to Metropolitan Universities Journal.

In Progress

Preparing to present our research at the invited convening of SVI participants at the AASCU meeting in February.

Project Health

Future collaboration opportunities with Motivate Lab, including attendance to The American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) conference to share our findings.

Project Team

Sponsor: Andrea Garrity
Project Lead: Pronoy Rai
Project Coordinator: Delaney Ybarra, Rianna Piatt
Team: Rianna Piatt, Rowanna Carpenter, Delaney Ybarra, Andrea Garrity, Pronoy Rai, Erica Wagner.