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

  • Hired and trained six student facilitators to lead the focus groups, who successfully completed six focus groups with 36 total participants
  • Awarded participants with a gift card of their choice
  • Met with the Motivate Labs team at the University of Virginia to gather published works for inclusion in our bibliography
  • Held final meeting with student facilitators and discussed best practices for relaying findings to students

In Progress

  • Student facilitators are entering the focus group data into our coding tool. Data analysis will follow.

Project Team

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