Collaborate, Elevate, and Engineer Together: Exploring the Role of Organizational Citizenship Behavior

With support from the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI Program), this Implementation and Evaluation Project aims to improve how students learn and stay engaged in mechanical engineering courses at the University of New Mexico. The project introduces the idea of organizational citizenship behavior into the classroom, meaning that it encourages students to go beyond just doing their own work to help each other, much like good teammates in a workplace. Engineering students often gain strong technical skills, but they perform even better when they feel welcome and supported by their classmates. This project will create learning environments where students are encouraged to work together, share ideas, and support one another. Such interactions can improve motivation, build confidence, and strengthen students’ connection to engineering. This project will design activities that promote collaboration and peer support. Through structured learning activities, the project will demonstrate how cooperative behaviors, such as sharing ideas, offering encouragement, or assisting classmates, can lead to improved student learning, greater confidence, and a stronger connection to the engineering field. The expected outcomes of this project are to help all students succeed by creating supportive, collaborative classrooms and developing teaching and learning strategies that can be shared widely to prepare students for their engineering careers. This project will (1) introduce the concept of organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) into undergraduate engineering education, (2) implement structured pedagogical interventions that encourage prosocial and voluntary student behaviors in the classroom, and (3) rigorously assess the impact of these interventions on key student outcomes. The project will employ a mixed-methods approach. This includes surveys, interviews, classroom observations, and analysis of academic performance data. The research team will examine both short-term and long-term outcomes of OCB-based instructional practices on student engagement and success. Expected results include improved student academic performance, more supportive behaviors, and a stronger sense of belonging and engineering identity. Resources and tools developed, along with key findings, will be shared through an open-access platform and academic dissemination efforts, so that other colleges and universities can adopt them to improve their engineering programs. This project is funded by the HSI Program, which aims to enhance undergraduate STEM education and increase capacity to engage in the development and implementation of innovations to improve STEM teaching and learning at HSIs. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.