Recent Research in Science Teaching and Learning.

The Current Insights feature is designed to introduce life-science educators and researchers to current articles of interest in other social science and education journals. In this installment, I highlight recent large-scale studies from the K-12 literature that can inform undergraduate teaching. The first characterizes how the sense of belonging can influence whether students offer their ideas during class. The second explores the how instructor-student relationships can be leveraged to improve teaching. The third explores whether rubrics or exemplars are better at helping students develop quality feedback on their own writing.

Current Insights.

The Current Insights feature is designed to introduce life science educators and researchers to current articles of interest in other social science and education journals. In this installment, I highlight three recent studies from the fields of psychology and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education that can inform life science education. The first characterizes how instructor beliefs about intelligence are communicated to students in the classroom. The second explores how instructor identity as a researcher may lead to different types of teaching identities. The third presents an alternative way to characterize students' success that is based in Latinx college student values.

Research Anxiety Predicts Undergraduates' Intentions to Pursue Scientific Research Careers.

Undergraduate research is lauded as a high-impact practice owing to the array of benefits that students can reap from participating. One unexplored construct that may affect student intent to persist in research is research anxiety, defined as the sense of worry or apprehension associated with conducting research. In this study, we surveyed 1272 undergraduate researchers across research-intensive, master's-granting, and primarily undergraduate institutions to assess the relationship among student demographics, research anxiety, and intent to pursue a research career. Using structural equation modeling, we identified that women and students with higher grade point averages (GPAs) were more likely to report higher levels of research anxiety compared with men and students with lower GPAs, respectively. Additionally, research anxiety was significantly and negatively related to student intent to pursue a research-related career. We coded students' open-ended responses about what alleviates and exacerbates their anxiety and found that experiencing failure in the context of research and feeling underprepared increased their research anxiety, while a positive lab environment and mentor-mentee relationships decreased their anxiety. This is the first study to examine undergraduate anxiety in the context of research at scale and to establish a relationship between research anxiety and students' intent to persist in scientific research careers.

"It's completely erasure": A Qualitative Exploration of Experiences of Transgender, Nonbinary, Gender Nonconforming, and Questioning Students in Biology Courses.

Biology is the study of the diversity of life, which includes diversity in sex, gender, and sexual, romantic, and related orientations. However, a small body of literature suggests that undergraduate biology courses focus on only a narrow representation of this diversity (binary sexes, heterosexual orientations, etc.). In this study, we interviewed students with queer genders to understand the messages about sex, gender, and orientation they encountered in biology and the impact of these messages on them. We found five overarching themes in these interviews. Students described two narratives about sex, gender, and orientation in their biology classes that made biology implicitly exclusionary. These narratives harmed students by impacting their sense of belonging, career preparation, and interest in biology content. However, students employed a range of resilience strategies to resist these harms. Finally, students described the currently unrealized potential for biology and biology courses to validate queer identities by representing the diversity in sex and orientation in biology. We provide teaching suggestions derived from student interviews for making biology more queer-inclusive.

Recent Research in Science Teaching and Learning.

The Current Insights feature is designed to introduce life science educators and researchers to current articles of interest in other social science and education journals. In this installment, I highlight three recent studies from the fields of psychology and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education that can inform life science education. The first assesses the impact of a novel study strategy: having students deliberately make mistakes and correct them. The second encourages educators to think more carefully about the impact of different types of interest on student learning. The third reminds us of the impact of personal beliefs in diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.

Talking Science: Undergraduates' Everyday Conversations as Acts of Boundary Spanning That Connect Science to Local Communities.

Biologists produce knowledge that can be applied to both global and personal challenges. Thus, communicating this knowledge to the general public is becoming increasingly important. One way information can move between different communities is through boundary spanners. Boundary spanners are individuals embedded in both communities who can communicate information known by one community to the other. We explore whether undergraduate biology majors can act as boundary spanners connecting their biology departments to laypeople in their personal networks. We conducted 20 interviews with upper-division first-generation college students at a large Hispanic-serving institution. These students were engaging in everyday conversations about science with people in their personal networks. They engaged in behaviors that characterize boundary spanners: translating scientific language into more common language and knowledge building, that is, providing background concepts that community members need to understand a topic. Finally, students were sometimes perceived as credible resources and sometimes were not. We explore some of the causes of this variation. The boundary spanning of undergraduates could help address one of the major challenges facing the scientific community: spreading the use of scientific knowledge in personal and policy decision making.

Current Insights.

The Current Insights feature is designed to introduce life science educators and researchers to current articles of interest in other social science and education journals. In this installment, I highlight three recent studies from the fields of psychology and higher education that can inform practices in the life sciences. The first is a synthesis paper that builds a unifying framework for the diverse activities that fall under the umbrella term "active learning." This paper emphasizes a novel aspect of the active-learning classroom: student agency. The second paper employs an underutilized framework in biology education research, quantitative critical theory, to explore why faculty-student interactions may not be universally beneficial. The third paper explores how valuing relationships can keep first-generation college students from reaching out for help when they need it. Together, these last two papers help researchers understand the perceived costs and benefits of seeking help from faculty.

Recent Research in Science Teaching and Learning.

The Current Insights feature is designed to introduce life science educators and researchers to current articles of interest in other social science and education journals. In this installment, I highlight three that explore how different types of stress can produce different educational outcomes, how studying by writing questions can improve performance, and how faculty beliefs about intelligence can influence students' interest in and evaluation of a course.

Recent Research in Science Teaching and Learning.

The Current Insights feature is designed to introduce life science educators and researchers to current articles of interest in other social science and education journals. In this installment, I highlight three studies drawing on psychology and learning sciences to understand how to increase student motivation to engage in scientific writing, how drawing can enhance learning, and whether spacing, or distributed practice, matters in actual classes.

Fourteen Recommendations to Create a More Inclusive Environment for LGBTQ+ Individuals in Academic Biology.

Individuals who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and otherwise nonstraight and/or non-cisgender (LGBTQ+) have often not felt welcome or represented in the biology community. Additionally, biology can present unique challenges for LGBTQ+ students because of the relationship between certain biology topics and their LGBTQ+ identities. Currently, there is no centralized set of guidelines to make biology learning environments more inclusive for LGBTQ+ individuals. Rooted in prior literature and the collective expertise of the authors who identify as members and allies of the LGBTQ+ community, we present a set of actionable recommendations to help biologists, biology educators, and biology education researchers be more inclusive of individuals with LGBTQ+ identities. These recommendations are intended to increase awareness of LGBTQ+ identities and spark conversations about transforming biology learning spaces and the broader academic biology community to become more inclusive of LGBTQ+ individuals.

Recent Research in Science Teaching and Learning.

The Current Insights feature is designed to introduce life science educators and researchers to current articles of interest in other social science and education journals. In this installment, I highlight three diverse research studies: one exploring classroom talk and how it impacts conceptual learning; one identifying a unique influence on evolution acceptance: statistical understanding; and the last a genetics lesson that reduces racial bias.

Recent Research in Science Teaching and Learning.

The Current Insights feature is designed to introduce life science educators and researchers to current articles of interest in other social science and education journals. In this installment, I highlight three diverse research studies: one exploring what researchers actually mean when they talk about relevance; one describing the relationships between instructor mindset about intelligence and performance gaps in the classroom; and the last describing a novel short intervention to reduce student's perceptions of costs.

True Grit: Passion and persistence make an innovative course design work.

Our first two experiments on adapting a high-structure course model to an essentially open-enrollment university produced negative or null results. Our third experiment, however, proved more successful: performance improved for all students, and a large achievement gap that impacted underrepresented minority students under traditional lecturing closed. Although the successful design included preclass preparation videos, intensive active learning in class, and weekly practice exams, student self-report data indicated that total study time decreased. Faculty who have the grit to experiment and persevere in making evidence-driven changes to their teaching can reduce the inequalities induced by economic and educational disadvantage.

Recent Research in Science Teaching and Learning.

The Current Insights feature is designed to introduce life science educators and researchers to current articles of interest in other social science and education journals. In this installment, I highlight three diverse research studies: one addresses the relationships between active learning and teaching evaluations; one presents an observation tool for documenting metacognition in the classroom; and the last explores things teachers can say to encourage students to employ scientific reasoning during class discussions.

Faculty Beliefs about Intelligence Are Related to the Adoption of Active-Learning Practices.

Mounting evidence of the efficacy of active learning has prompted educators to consider adoption of these practices in college-level classrooms. One tenet of active learning is that most, if not all, students have the ability to learn. Instructors' perspectives on learning, however, may or may not be aligned with this. One belief held by some educators is that intelligence is fixed, that is, some students are more intelligent and have a higher ability to learn than others. Instructors with a fixed mindset may not be convinced that their investment in developing active-learning materials will be as fruitful as the education evidence suggests, because these instructors may not believe that most students can grow in their learning. Here, we explored the relationship between fixed mindsets and the adoption of active-learning strategies. We found that instructors with higher fixed mindsets were less persuaded that active-learning strategies were a good idea and less likely to implement the teaching practices. Our research suggests that development initiatives should explicitly address educators' lay theories of intelligence ( fixed or growth mindset) to support successful implementation of active learning.

The trade-off between graduate student research and teaching: A myth?

Many current faculty believe that teaching effort and research success are inversely correlated. This trade-off has rarely been empirically tested; yet, it still impedes efforts to increase the use of evidence-based teaching (EBT), and implement effective teaching training programs for graduate students, our future faculty. We tested this tradeoff for graduate students using a national sample of life science PhD students. We characterize how increased training in EBT impacts PhD students' confidence in their preparation for a research career, in communicating their research, and their publication number. PhD students who invested time into EBT did not suffer in confidence in research preparedness, scientific research communication, or in publication number. Instead, overall, the data trend towards a slight synergy between investing in EBT and research preparation. Thus, the tension between developing research and teaching skills may not be salient for today's graduate students. This work is proof of concept that institutions can incorporate training in EBT into graduate programs without reducing students' preparedness for a research career. Although some institutions already have graduate teaching programs, increasing these programs at scale, and including training in EBT methods could create a new avenue for accelerating the spread of evidence-based teaching and improved teaching across higher education.

Values Affirmation Intervention Reduces Achievement Gap between Underrepresented Minority and White Students in Introductory Biology Classes.

Achievement gaps between underrepresented minority (URM) students and their white peers in college science, technology, engineering, and mathematics classrooms are persistent across many white-majority institutions of higher education. Attempts to reduce this phenomenon of underperformance through increasing classroom structure via active learning have been partially successful. In this study, we address the hypothesis that the achievement gap between white and URM students in an undergraduate biology course has a psychological and emotional component arising from stereotype threat. Specifically, we introduced a values affirmation exercise that counters stereotype threat by reinforcing a student's feelings of integrity and self-worth in three iterations of an intensive active-learning college biology course. On average, this exercise reduced the achievement gap between URM and white students who entered the course with the same incoming grade point average. This result suggests that achievement gaps resulting from the underperformance of URM students could be mitigated by providing students with a learning environment that removes psychological and emotional impediments of performance through short psychosocial interventions.

Student perception of group dynamics predicts individual performance: Comfort and equity matter.

Active learning in college classes and participation in the workforce frequently hinge on small group work. However, group dynamics vary, ranging from equitable collaboration to dysfunctional groups dominated by one individual. To explore how group dynamics impact student learning, we asked students in a large-enrollment university biology class to self-report their experience during in-class group work. Specifically, we asked students whether there was a friend in their group, whether they were comfortable in their group, and whether someone dominated their group. Surveys were administered after students participated in two different types of intentionally constructed group activities: 1) a loosely-structured activity wherein students worked together for an entire class period (termed the 'single-group' activity), or 2) a highly-structured 'jigsaw' activity wherein students first independently mastered different subtopics, then formed new groups to peer-teach their respective subtopics. We measured content mastery by the change in score on identical pre-/post-tests. We then investigated whether activity type or student demographics predicted the likelihood of reporting working with a dominator, being comfortable in their group, or working with a friend. We found that students who more strongly agreed that they worked with a dominator were 17.8% less likely to answer an additional question correct on the 8-question post-test. Similarly, when students were comfortable in their group, content mastery increased by 27.5%. Working with a friend was the single biggest predictor of student comfort, although working with a friend did not impact performance. Finally, we found that students were 67% less likely to agree that someone dominated their group during the jigsaw activities than during the single group activities. We conclude that group activities that rely on positive interdependence, and include turn-taking and have explicit prompts for students to explain their reasoning, such as our jigsaw, can help reduce the negative impact of inequitable groups.

ASPECT: A Survey to Assess Student Perspective of Engagement in an Active-Learning Classroom.

The primary measure used to determine relative effectiveness of in-class activities has been student performance on pre/posttests. However, in today's active-learning classrooms, learning is a social activity, requiring students to interact and learn from their peers. To develop effective active-learning exercises that engage students, it is important to gain a more holistic view of the student experience in an active-learning classroom. We have taken a mixed-methods approach to iteratively develop and validate a 16-item survey to measure multiple facets of the student experience during active-learning exercises. The instrument, which we call Assessing Student Perspective of Engagement in Class Tool (ASPECT), was administered to a large introductory biology class, and student responses were subjected to exploratory factor analysis. The 16 items loaded onto three factors that cumulatively explained 52% of the variation in student response: 1) value of activity, 2) personal effort, and 3) instructor contribution. ASPECT provides a rapid, easily administered means to measure student perception of engagement in an active-learning classroom. Gaining a better understanding of students' level of engagement will help inform instructor best practices and provide an additional measure for comprehensively assessing the impact of different active-learning strategies.