Belonging as a gateway for learning: First‐year engineering students' characterizations of factors that promote and detract from sense of belonging in a pandemic

A predictor of student success, sense of belonging (SB) is often inhibited for minoritized students in engineering environments and difficult to foster in online courses. A shift to remote learning formats necessitated by COVID‐19, therefore, posed an additive threat to SB for engineering first‐year students, especially those with minoritized identities. Research is needed to understand impacts of online learning to SB for engineering students.