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The Power of Presence: Examining the Role of Faculty Diversity in Enhancing Black Students’ Sense of Belonging and Self-Efficacy

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2025-04-18

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Previous studies have brought awareness to the factors that perpetuate the Black-White achievement gap including a lack of self-efficacy and sense of belonging in Black students in the school system. This experiment focuses in on these factors and aims to find a solution to improve them in Black students through randomly placing Black college-aged participants into 5 conditional groups. These conditions included graphs that represent the perception of diversity norms or trends operationalized, showing the percentage of Black faculty members in a hypothetical university over 5 years reflecting increase or progression, a consistently high percentage or high stability, a consistently low percentage or low stability, or a decrease or regression, and lastly the control condition presented only one year in the graph. After viewing the graphs, the participants were asked to answer questions based on sense of belonging, self-efficacy, and the measure of how much an individual believes their identity aligns to another’s identity (perceived identity compatibility). The results showed the participants having most significant increase in sense of belonging when in the progression condition followed by the high stability condition and with the low stability and regression conditions producing the least sense of belonging in participants compared to the other conditions. However, there were no significant differences for the self-efficacy questions and the perceived identity compatibility questions between each condition which followed the same trend. The sense of belonging results suggest that universities may benefit from improving upon the number of minorities in their faculty but also making students aware of the diversity in the faculty over time.

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