Undergraduate R Programming Anxiety in Ecology: Persistent Gender Gaps and Coping Strategies.

The ability to program in R, an open-source statistical program, is increasingly valued across job markets, including ecology. The benefits of teaching R to undergraduates are abundant, but learning to code in R may induce anxiety for students, potentially leading to negative learning outcomes and disengagement. Anecdotes suggest a gender differential in programming anxiety, with women experiencing greater anxiety. Currently, we do not know the extent to which programming anxiety exists in our undergraduate biology classrooms, whether it differs by gender, and what instructors can do to alleviate it. Instructor immediacy has been shown to mediate related anxieties such as quantitative and computer anxiety. Likewise, students' use of adaptive coping strategies may mitigate anxieties. We investigated students' R anxiety within a lower-division ecology course and explored its relationships with gender, instructor immediacy, classroom engagement, and reported coping strategies. Women reported significantly higher R anxiety than men, a gap that narrowed, yet persisted over the semester. In addition, several specific coping skills were associated with decreases in R anxiety and increases in self-concept and sense of control; these differed by gender identity. Our findings can guide future work to identify interventions that lessen programming anxiety in biology classes, especially for women.

Experimental warming differentially affects vegetative and reproductive phenology of tundra plants.

Rapid climate warming is altering Arctic and alpine tundra ecosystem structure and function, including shifts in plant phenology. While the advancement of green up and flowering are well-documented, it remains unclear whether all phenophases, particularly those later in the season, will shift in unison or respond divergently to warming. Here, we present the largest synthesis to our knowledge of experimental warming effects on tundra plant phenology from the International Tundra Experiment. We examine the effect of warming on a suite of season-wide plant phenophases. Results challenge the expectation that all phenophases will advance in unison to warming. Instead, we find that experimental warming caused: (1) larger phenological shifts in reproductive versus vegetative phenophases and (2) advanced reproductive phenophases and green up but delayed leaf senescence which translated to a lengthening of the growing season by approximately 3%. Patterns were consistent across sites, plant species and over time. The advancement of reproductive seasons and lengthening of growing seasons may have significant consequences for trophic interactions and ecosystem function across the tundra.