Changing Social Contexts to Foster Equity in College Science Courses: An Ecological-Belonging Intervention.

In diverse classrooms, stereotypes are often "in the air," which can interfere with learning and performance among stigmatized students. Two studies designed to foster equity in college science classrooms (Ns = 1,215 and 607) tested an intervention to establish social norms that make stereotypes irrelevant in the classroom. At the beginning of the term, classrooms assigned to an ecological-belonging intervention engaged in discussion with peers around the message that social and academic adversity is normative and that students generally overcome such adversity. Compared with business-as-usual controls, intervention students had higher attendance, course grades, and 1-year college persistence. The intervention was especially impactful among historically underperforming students, as it improved course grades for ethnic minorities in introductory biology and for women in introductory physics. Regardless of demographics, attendance in the intervention classroom predicted higher cumulative grade point averages 2 to 4 years later. The results illustrate the viability of an ecological approach to fostering equity and unlocking student potential.

Herbivory and relative growth rates of Pieris rapae are correlated with host constitutive salicylic acid and flowering time.

Treatment of plants with exogenous salicylic acid (SA) improves resistance to many bacterial pathogens, but can suppress resistance to insect herbivores. While plants vary naturally in constitutive SA, whether such differences are predictive of resistance to insect herbivores has not been studied previously. We examined the possible role of this endogenous SA in structuring the interactions between the cabbage white butterfly, Pieris rapae, and ten hosts in the mustard family (Brassicaceae). Because P. rapae has multiple generations that utilize different hosts across the year, we included five spring-flowering mustards and five summer-flowering mustards that co-occur in ruderal habitats in upstate New York. Under common garden conditions, the spring flowering mustards (Capsella bursa-pastoris, Draba verna, Cardamine impatiens, Barbarea vulgaris, and Arabidopsis thaliana) were significantly more resistant to P. rapae, supporting 42 % less herbivory (P = 0.015) and 64 % lower relative growth rates (P = 0.007), relative to the summer flowering mustards (Sisymbrium altissimum, Brassica nigra, Sinapis arvense, Lepidium campestre, and Arabis canadensis). Leaf total constitutive SA explained significant variation in larval herbivory (R (2) = 75.3 %, P = 0.007) and relative growth rates (R (2) = 59.4 %, P = 0.043). The three species with the lowest levels of constitutive SA (Capsella bursa-pastoris, Draba verna, and Cardamine impatiens) were the most resistant to larvae. Barbarea vulgaris and Arabis canadensis were notable exceptions, exhibiting high SA concentrations and intermediate resistance to P. rapae. These results suggest a curvilinear relationship between leaf constitutive SA and the herbivory by P. rapae, and they provide some insight into the ecology and possible management of this economically important crop pest.

Development of the Mentoring in Undergraduate Research Survey.

Here we present the development of the Mentoring in Undergraduate Research Survey (MURS) as a measure of a range of mentoring experienced by undergraduate science researchers. We drafted items based on qualitative research and refined the items through cognitive interviews and expert sorting. We used one national dataset to evaluate the internal structure of the measure and a second national dataset to examine how responses on the MURS related to theoretically relevant constructs and student characteristics. Our factor analytic results indicate seven lower order forms of mentoring experiences: abusive supervision, accessibility, technical support, psychosocial support, interpersonal mismatch, sexual harassment, and unfair treatment. These forms of mentoring mapped onto two higher-order factors: supportive and destructive mentoring experiences. Although most undergraduates reported experiencing supportive mentoring, some reported experiencing absence of supportive as well as destructive experiences. Undergraduates who experienced less supportive and more destructive mentoring also experienced lower scientific integration and a dampening of their beliefs about the value of research. The MURS should be useful for investigating the effects of mentoring experienced by undergraduate researchers and for testing interventions aimed at fostering supportive experiences and reducing or preventing destructive experiences and their impacts.

Undergraduate Lay Theories of Abilities: Mindset, universality, and brilliance beliefs uniquely predict undergraduate educational outcomes.

Students' beliefs about their abilities (called "lay theories") affect their motivations, behaviors, and academic success. Lay theories include beliefs about the potential to improve intelligence (mindset), who (i.e., everyone or only some people) has the potential to be excellent in a field (universality), and whether reaching excellence in a field requires raw intellectual talent (brilliance). Research demonstrates that each of these beliefs influences students' educational experiences and academic outcomes. However, it remains unclear whether they represent distinct latent constructs or are susceptible to the "jangle fallacy" (i.e., different names given to the same underlying construct). We conducted a multiphase, mixed-methods study to 1) evaluate whether mindset, universality, and brilliance beliefs represent conceptually and empirically discriminable concepts, and 2) evaluate whether mindset, universality, and brilliance beliefs contribute unique explanatory value for both psychosocial (e.g., sense of belonging) and academic outcomes (e.g., course grades). To address these questions, we developed and collected validity evidence for a new measure of science and math undergraduates' lay theories, called the Undergraduate Lay Theories of Abilities (ULTrA) survey. Factor analyses suggest that mindset, brilliance, and universality are distinct and empirically discriminable constructs. Structural Equation Models indicate that each lay theory contributes unique predictive value to relevant outcomes.

Learning Introductory Biology: Students' Concept-Building Approaches Predict Transfer on Biology Exams.

Previous studies have found that students' concept-building approaches, identified a priori with a cognitive psychology laboratory task, are associated with student exam performances in chemistry classes. Abstraction learners (those who extract the principles underlying related examples) performed better than exemplar learners (those who focus on memorizing the training exemplars and responses) on transfer exam questions but not retention questions, after accounting for general ability. We extended these findings to introductory biology courses in which active-learning techniques were used to try to foster deep conceptual learning. Exams were constructed to contain both transfer and retention questions. Abstraction learners demonstrated better performance than exemplar learners on the transfer questions but not on the retention questions. These results were not moderated by indices of crystallized or fluid intelligence. Our central interpretation is that students identified as abstraction learners appear to construct a deep understanding of the concepts (presumably based on abstract underpinnings), thereby enabling them to apply and generalize the concepts to scenarios and instantiations not seen during instruction (transfer questions). By contrast, other students appear to base their representations on memorized instructed examples, leading to good performance on retention questions but not transfer questions.

Am I a Science Person? A Strong Science Identity Bolsters Minority Students' Sense of Belonging and Performance in College.

Identifying as a "science person" is predictive of science success, but the mechanisms involved are not well-understood. We hypothesized that science identity predicts success because it fosters a sense of belonging in science classrooms. Thus, science identity should be particularly important for first-generation and racial-minority students, who may harbor doubts about belonging in science. Two field studies in college Introductory Biology classes (Ns = 368, 639) supported these hypotheses. A strong science identity predicted higher grades, particularly for minority students. Also consistent with hypotheses, Study 2 found that self-reported belonging in college mediated the relationship between science identity and performance. Furthermore, a social belonging manipulation eliminated the relationship between science identity and performance among minority students. These results support the idea that a strong science identity is particularly beneficial for minority students because it bolsters belonging in science courses. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed.

Leveraging Psychosocial Interventions to Motivate Instructor Participation in Teaching Professional Development.

To promote undergraduate education reform, teaching professional development (TPD) efforts aim to encourage instructors to adopt evidence-based practices. However, many instructors do not attend TPD. There may be many reasons for this, including low intrinsic motivation to participate in TPD. Psychologists have dealt with motivational barriers in educational contexts using psychosocial interventions, brief activities that draw on a rich history of psychological research to subtly alter key, self-reinforcing psychological processes to yield long-term intrinsic motivation and behavioral changes. Psychosocial interventions, for example, have been used to alter students' noncognitive attitudes and beliefs, such as attributions and mindset, which positively influence students' motivation and academic performance. Here, we propose that insights from research on psychosocial interventions may be leveraged to design interventions that will increase instructors' motivation to participate in TPD, thus enhancing existing pedagogical reform efforts. We discuss psychological principles and "best practices" underlying effective psychosocial interventions that could guide the development of interventions to increase instructors' motivation to attend TPD. We encourage new interdisciplinary research collaborations to explore the potential of these interventions, which could be a new approach to mitigating at least one barrier to undergraduate education reform.

Knowledge or Abilities? How Undergraduates Define Intelligence.

Whether students view intelligence as a fixed or malleable trait (i.e., their "mindset") has significant implications for their responses to failure and academic outcomes. Despite a long history of research on mindset and its growing popularity, recent meta-analyses suggest that mindset does a poor job of predicting academic outcomes for undergraduate populations. Here, we present evidence that these mixed results could be due to ambiguous language on the mindset scale. Specifically, the term "intelligence" is a referent in every item of the mindset scale but is never defined, which could result in differing interpretations and measurement error. Therefore, we conducted an exploratory, qualitative study to characterize how undergraduate students define intelligence and how their definitions may influence how they respond to the mindset scale. We uncovered two distinct ways that undergraduates define intelligence: knowledge and abilities (e.g., ability to learn, solve problems). Additionally, we found that students' definitions of intelligence can vary across contexts. Finally, we present evidence that students who define intelligence differently also interpret and respond to the items on the mindset scale differently. We discuss implications of these results for the use and interpretation of the mindset scale with undergraduate students.

Undergraduate Biology Education Research Gordon Research Conference: A Meeting Report.

The 2019 Undergraduate Biology Education Research Gordon Research Conference (UBER GRC), titled "Achieving Widespread Improvement in Undergraduate Education," brought together a diverse group of researchers and practitioners working to identify, promote, and understand widespread adoption of evidence-based teaching, learning, and success strategies in undergraduate biology. Graduate students and postdocs had the additional opportunity to present and discuss research during a Gordon Research Seminar (GRS) that preceded the GRC. This report provides a broad overview of the UBER GRC and GRS and highlights major themes that cut across invited talks, poster presentations, and informal discussions. Such themes include the importance of working in teams at multiple levels to achieve instructional improvement, the potential to use big data and analytics to inform instructional change, the need to customize change initiatives, and the importance of psychosocial supports in improving undergraduate student well-being and academic success. The report also discusses the future of the UBER GRC as an established meeting and describes aspects of the conference that make it unique, both in terms of facilitating dissemination of research and providing a welcoming environment for conferees.

Volunteered or Voluntold? The Motivations and Perceived Outcomes of Graduate and Postdoctoral Mentors of Undergraduate Researchers.

Graduate students and postdoctoral researchers (postgraduates) in the life sciences frequently mentor undergraduate researchers, especially at research universities. Yet there has been only modest investigation of this relationship from the postgraduate perspective. We conducted an exploratory study of the experiences of 32 postgraduate mentors from diverse institutions, life sciences disciplines, and types of research to examine their motivations for mentoring and their perceived outcomes. Although some postgraduates reported feeling pressured to mentor undergraduate researchers, all expressed personal motivations, including both agentic (self-focused) and communal (community-focused) motivations. These postgraduates reported benefits and costs of mentoring that had both vocational and psychosocial elements. Given that our results indicated that even postgraduates who engaged in mentoring at the request of their faculty advisors had their own motivations, we conducted a second phase of analysis to determine the extent to which our results aligned with different theories of motivation (self-determination theory, social cognitive career theory, expectancy-value theory, social exchange theory). We end by proposing a model of postgraduate mentoring of undergraduate researchers that integrates the theories supported by our findings.

"Where's My Mentor?!" Characterizing Negative Mentoring Experiences in Undergraduate Life Science Research.

Undergraduate research experiences in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields are championed for promoting students' personal and professional development. Mentorship is an integral part of undergraduate research, as effective mentorship maximizes the benefits undergraduates realize from participating in research. Yet almost no research examines instances in which mentoring is less effective or even problematic, even though prior research on mentoring in workplace settings suggests negative mentoring experiences are common. Here, we report the results of a qualitative study to define and characterize negative mentoring experiences of undergraduate life science researchers. Undergraduate researchers in our study reported seven major ways they experienced negative mentoring: absenteeism, abuse of power, interpersonal mismatch, lack of career support, lack of psychosocial support, misaligned expectations, and unequal treatment. They described some of these experiences as the result of absence of positive mentoring behavior and others as actively harmful behavior, both of which they perceive as detrimental to their psychosocial and career development. Our results are useful to mentors for reflecting on ways their behaviors might be perceived as harmful or unhelpful. These findings can also serve as a foundation for future research aimed at examining the prevalence and impact of negative mentoring experiences in undergraduate research.