The culture of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) is often cited as being competitive. This creates a driving force for attrition from these fields, especially for minoritized students. But what-according to students-defines competition in the STEM classroom environment? This study seeks to answer that question by examining the factors that students report as contributing to competition in STEM classrooms. To do this, we conducted semistructured interviews with 25 first-generation and racially minoritized students enrolled in an introductory biology course, and with experience in other university-level STEM courses. Using thematic analysis, we identified four broad categories shaping students' sense of competition: student factors (e.g., grade comparisons), instructor factors (e.g., instructor messaging), course factors (e.g., grading), and out-of-class factors (e.g., intended career goals). These findings suggest that competition is not a singular classroom characteristic but rather a multidimensional experience shaped by interpersonal, environmental, and structural factors. We contextualize our findings in a conceptual framework of competition, which identifies how trait-competitiveness, perceived environmental competitiveness, and structural competition all shape competition. Our findings help operationalize these dimensions of competition in STEM classrooms and provide actionable context for mitigating the disproportionate impact of competition on minoritized students.
Incorporating counterstereotypical scientist role models into undergraduate biology courses is a powerful, evidence-based way to support student persistence in STEM fields. However, educational resources featuring counterstereotypical scientists could unintentionally have adverse impacts on student attitudes towards science. Here, we leveraged a multi-institution experiment that manipulated whether educational materials included information on the obstacles faced by counterstereotypical scientists in their careers. After students received these variable materials, we documented the obstacles they perceived they may face as scientists. Through the lens of attribution theory, we found that students are aware of a variety of obstacles they would face as scientists and that student perceptions of those obstacles are not changed by sharing the obstacles that scientists had to overcome. We encourage instructors to share scientists' stories of the obstacles they faced in their careers without concern that this will alter students' perceptions of careers in science.
Social metacognition occurs when students monitor and evaluate their own and others' thinking out loud during group work. Social metacognition, such as directly correcting peers, may be perceived as risky by students. However, this has not yet been systematically investigated. To address this gap in knowledge, we used the sociolinguistic framework of politeness theory to explore student perceptions of risk associated with social metacognition use during group work in undergraduate life science courses. We recorded four small groups as they worked together in introductory biology labs and biochemistry courses and then conducted stimulated recall interviews with 12 students from those groups. Transcripts were analyzed qualitatively and iteratively using a narrative and holistic group profile approach. Our findings support the prediction that social metacognition that involves the skill of evaluation tends to involve more risk. Students employ politeness strategies like hedging and questioning when the use of social metacognition involves greater risk to either the hearer's or speaker's face. Additionally, students' views of group member expertise and identity influenced their perceptions. This is the first study to explore student perceptions of risk associated with social metacognition, providing essential information for developing effective social metacognition interventions.
Stereotypes about scientists narrow how students relate to them and influence how students see themselves in science. However, sharing identities and interests of contemporary scientists enables students to see aspects of their possible selves in that role. Previous work has demonstrated positive impacts of scientist role models on students who share marginalized identities in society and STEM, though less work has addressed whether the same positive effect would occur if the shared identity is more common in a broader societal context. We address this question by exploring the impact of an instructor revealing that she is Christian as a counter-stereotypical scientist identity in a large-enrollment undergraduate biology course. Scientists are less religious than the general population and are often stereotyped as non-religious. We found that briefly revealing the instructor's religious identity had a neutral impact on most students and that Christian students were most likely to report that the information was appropriate, positively impacted their course experience, and positively impacted their sense of inclusion. We contribute to the role model literature with an example of how shared identities positively impact students who most relate, even when the identity is not underrepresented in the educational context or across the United States.
Build Your Research Community (BYRC) is an asynchronous, free online course that guides research students to build effective relationships with their primary research advisors as well as build mentoring networks that provide holistic support as they navigate their research training experiences and careers. Preliminary evaluation evidence of the effectiveness of BYRC was collected from undergraduate, postbaccalaureate, and graduate students in 22 biomedical research training programs, as well as students who enrolled in the course independently from across the country. Students valued the course components, module topics, and structure, and the majority indicated they would recommend it to others. Students self-reported learning gains for all course modules, identified several specific course elements that positively impacted their learning and development, and indicated that the course positively impacted their current and future training experiences and mentoring relationships. Students at earlier training stages reported the greatest impacts. In addition, training program directors reported satisfaction with the course and their ability to integrate the course into their existing programs. Overall, these results indicate that the BYRC course may be an effective addition to research training programs. All course materials are freely available online (https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/WR6KP), and the modules may be implemented independently.
Metacognition can support undergraduates in challenging science courses by helping them to monitor their understanding of concepts, evaluate their approaches for learning, and change their plans for studying as needed. Fostering metacognitive development can help students succeed in science, yet there is limited understanding of how students develop metacognition in college. We conducted one of the first longitudinal studies to investigate how, when, and why life science students use metacognition throughout their undergraduate career. We used yearly semi-structured interviews to capture students' use of metacognition across four years of college. By conducting longitudinal qualitative data analysis, we outline a framework of metacognitive change that details the stages that are evident for each metacognitive skill. We synthesize our findings into milestones students reach as their metacognition develops. For example, students initially use planning and evaluating separately and reach a milestone when they first connect these skills by using their evaluations to inform their study plans. Later, some, but not all, students reach the milestone of integrating all three skills by connecting monitoring to their planning and evaluating. We use our results to build theory on metacognitive development, and we offer suggestions for instructors who aim to foster their students' metacognition.
While extensive research explores the difficulties undergraduate students face when learning chemistry or biology, less is known about how students learn across disciplines, especially when constructing mechanistic explanations. This study investigates (1) how undergraduate students explain differences in protein function, focusing on their use of conceptual resources and mechanistic reasoning, and (2) how task design influences their explanations. Using three different tasks with the same underlying mechanistic explanation, we analyzed responses from students who had completed a transformed cell and molecular biology course to determine what conceptual resources they use and how they connect those resources. Our findings show that, given a task with appropriate scaffolding, half of the students constructed mechanistic explanations. We also found that students rarely integrated ideas from both biology and chemistry, but when they did, they consistently constructed mechanistic explanations. Task design significantly influenced the conceptual resources students used and the frequency of mechanistic explanations. These findings highlight the need for careful instructional and curricular design to support cross-disciplinary learning and mechanistic reasoning in STEM education.
While assertions are common about what fosters inclusive undergraduate STEM classrooms, few studies have systematically investigated student perspectives. Additionally, it is unclear how students broadly perceive active learning practices in relation to inclusion. As such, we purposefully investigated student perceptions of classroom inclusion across courses in a biology department enriched with evidence-based teaching and situated in an urban, public institution. Student perceptions were investigated using open-ended prompts on a department-wide, end-of-term assessment. Results revealed that students, across social identities, do indeed report active learning strategies-as well as instructor interactions and collaborative classroom culture-as fostering inclusion. Student reports about instructor practices associated with their inclusion or exclusion clustered into four mirrored categories: Building/Dismantling the Instructor/Student Relationship, Making/Compromising Student-Centered Pedagogical Choices, Establishing Collaborative/Non-Collaborative Classroom Culture, and Portraying Science as Inclusive/Exclusive. These categories comprise a new analytical framework, the Student Perceptions of Instructor Practices-Inclusion/Exclusion (SPIP-I/E) Framework, for investigating student perspectives on inclusion. Intriguingly, student reports about inclusion consistently alluded to instructor language, and the emergent SPIP-I/E Framework aligns with existing Instructor Talk frameworks. We hypothesize that modest differences in instructor language-surrounding any teaching strategy-may mediate and be a predictive, explanatory variable for student perceptions of inclusion.
Sustainably increasing the use of active learning in undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses is a complex challenge. At Texas State University, we are tackling this by merging the Learning Assistant (LA) model for peer educators with a team-based instructional change approach. This study assesses the efficacy of our approach through the lens of faculty and LAs carrying out the work. In Spring 2023, we interviewed eight faculty and 15 LAs who participated in an effort to redesign and collaboratively teach two multi-section introductory biology courses. We now address the research questions: 1) What do faculty and LAs perceive as supports and barriers for creating more student-centered instruction? and 2) How do faculty and LA perceptions compared with each other? Faculty and LAs focused on similar supports, such as program structures that enabled progress and healthy collaboration across power differences. Faculty and LAs focused on different barriers, with faculty focusing more on structural barriers like classrooms and class sizes, and LAs focusing more on student experiences. Our research suggests practices that can support this type of instructional change, such as creating structures that enable faculty to collaborate with their peers and fostering a program culture where students’ contributions are valued.
Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CURE) have been proposed as a mechanism to increase persistence in science. However, most evidence for their impact comes from self-reported surveys conducted under conditions of volunteer bias and at residential, resource-rich institutions. We investigated an introductory biology CURE at Eastern Michigan University, a large, diverse, nonresidential regional comprehensive university. Using institutional data from more than 2500 students across multiple semesters, we compared outcomes of the CURE in conditions both with and without volunteer bias. When students could choose whether to take the CURE or a traditional lab (volunteer CURE), students in the CURE were more likely to enroll in a subsequent biology course. When only the CURE was offered (nonvolunteer CURE), students were less likely to enroll in a subsequent biology course compared with students in previous semesters when only the traditional lab was offered. CURE participation did not affect students' likelihood of remaining at the university. Across analyses, concurrent Grade Point Average (GPA) was the strongest predictor of subsequent enrollment. These findings suggest that the effects of CUREs on persistence in STEM and university retention are shaped by volunteer bias.
This article proposes the Competence Amplification Framework as a theory-informed framework that structures how instructors notice and highlight student competence across phases of teaching: design, surface, and amplify. This framework builds on the teaching strategy assigning competence from Complex Instruction, offering an in-depth structure for attending to competence throughout the teaching and learning process. This article introduces the framework, grounds practices in examples from STEM classrooms, and offers practical guidance for instructors to produce more equitable classrooms by intentionally elevating student status through their instruction.
An important goal of STEM education is to develop the ability to think like a scientist: to critically analyze evidence, form evidence-based claims, and think of follow-up experiments. When designing assignments to foster these skills, it is important to consider the effect of prompt design. To investigate this effect, we provided 110 upper-division biology majors with three prompts that asked them to interpret the same figure from a scientific paper but differed in the cues and in the context of the task, presenting it as an argument-building, Sense-making, or Grant-reviewer activity. Responses by biology faculty served as a benchmark of thinking like a scientist. The Argument and Sensemaking prompts elicited more complete interpretations of the data than the Grant reviewer prompt, but students responding to all three prompts struggled to form claims based on multiple panels of the figure. Inclusion of cues to critique the data and offer follow-up experiments in the Sense-making and Grant reviewer prompts resulted in most responses including these scientific practices. The Grant reviewer prompt elicited critical evaluation of the data to support an argument for or against "funding." Our results indicate that prompt design substantially influences what scientific skills students will demonstrate.
Women of Color (WOC) remain underrepresented in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) graduate education due to a wide range of entrenched structural, cultural, and institutional barriers. Drawing on Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT) and Community Cultural Wealth (CCW) framework, this study examines how aspirational, social-navigational, and resistant capital shape WOC's STEM graduate aspirations. We apply multinomial logistic regression to a longitudinal data from 1353 senior WOC graduating with STEM bachelor's degrees to identify factors predicting their likelihood of pursuing a STEM or non-STEM graduate degree, relative to having no graduate aspirations. Results indicate that WOC who received frequent faculty mentorship and had high college involvement scores reported significantly greater likelihoods of pursuing a STEM graduate degree, while WOC who had a strong commitment to community leadership and advocacy for social change demonstrated a lower likelihood of pursuing a STEM graduate degree. The study highlights the need for inclusive mentorship and institutional policies that better support, recognize, and cultivate the diverse cultural wealth of WOC students as they navigate their paths through college and beyond.
Despite the significant shift in the career landscape for biology doctorates-a decline in academic positions and robust growth in industry employment-postdoctoral training remains the most common immediate next step. Guided by Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT), this study examines (1) the self-efficacy, contextual factors, and outcome expectations that shape biology PhD graduates' early career decisions, and (2) the perceived strengths and gaps in doctoral training identified after entering the job market. Drawing on semistructured interviews with 57 biology PhD graduates from the early career research (ECR) project, we found that graduates who pursued postdocs described strong self-efficacy in research and mentoring, whereas those in non-postdoc roles emphasized confidence in transferable skills. Principal investigators (PIs) were generally supportive yet often lacked the resources or networks to guide nonacademic transitions. Career decisions were also shaped by outcome expectations, with both extrinsic factors and intrinsic motivations influencing career choices. Additionally, regardless of career decisions, nearly all participants reported that their programs effectively developed core scientific and research skills but left critical gaps in business and management skills, advanced statistics and programming, and structured career development. These findings suggest areas in which biology doctoral programs may more intentionally support diverse career pathways, including expanded career development support, interdisciplinary skill-building, and strengthened faculty mentorship for diverse careers.
Academic advising plays a major role in shaping undergraduate life sciences students' experiences through college. However, despite the critical nature of advising, there have been relatively few studies examining students' experiences with advising and how these experiences may influence their academic journeys. Here, we investigate first-generation college students' experiences with academic advising in biology and throughout STEM. Through the lens of community cultural wealth, we found several themes such as balancing independence and pressures to succeed, identity as a source for empowerment and motivation, wanting reassurance and support from advisors, as well as negative outcomes during interactions with advisors. We also provide recommendations from student participants on how to improve academic advising. This research adds to the limited, but growing, body of literature on academic advising broadly, and within biology and other STEM fields specifically.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and asexual (LGBTQIA+) students continue to face violence, exclusion, and barriers at school, including in STEM education. A key underexamined factor in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts is the content of the life science curriculum, which is uniquely positioned to reinforce or refute bioessentialist, binary, and heteronormative biases. Outdated science curricula not only conflict with current scientific evidence but can also perpetuate beliefs that contribute to sexism and LGBTQIA+ marginalization. To address this, we designed four gender and sexual diversity (GSD)-inclusive biology activities, aligned with NGSS standards, and informed by inclusive curriculum frameworks. Using a mixed-methods approach, we studied 127 high school students who participated in two or more inclusive biology activities. Surveys conducted before and after implementation showed significant reductions in essential, binary beliefs about sex and gender, and increases in affirming attitudes toward sex and gender diversity. Interviews conducted after implementation further revealed differences between LGBTQIA+ and straight students' conceptualizations of biological sex. Our findings demonstrate that even brief curriculum interventions can shift student attitudes, although we hope future studies will explore the impact of sustained interventions. Updating life science instruction is essential for educational equity and scientific accuracy.
Participatory sciences (any science that depends on the knowledge or involvement of the public) are increasingly being included in undergraduate courses. Although they have most often been integrated into undergraduate courses to engage students, we expand ideas of how these approaches can be used to promote student learning. First, we explore three theoretical frameworks, culturally sustaining pedagogy, control value theory, and the ICAP (Interactive, Constructive, Active, Passive) framework, that help explain why incorporating participatory science is an effective classroom practice at disrupting opportunity hoarding (a fourth framework). These theories focus on motivating learning, illustrating the power of participatory sciences as a mechanism of inclusive science, and attuning pedagogical practices specifically to participatory science curricula. Second, we use these theories to design a model with three orthogonal axes: science agency, breadth of interaction within classes and with external communities, and social justice. This model is designed to be aspirational for instructors to more fully capture how participatory sciences can be used in higher education to maximize instructional goals. We hope to promote reflection among instructors and provide ideas for how they can implement participatory science to expose students to research and use evidence-based reasoning to develop solutions for local and global problems.
Learning Assistants (LAs) can reduce psychosocial barriers in gateway science courses. In this study, we specify the impact on students from different demographic groups. An inductive analysis of group interviews with 33 students from introductory biology and general chemistry courses revealed six narratives that capture students' experiences with course structures, people, and personal connections. All students valued varied, flexible resources, but other narratives differed across groups. Underrepresented racial/ethnic and first-generation students described active and collaborative learning as promoting belonging, confidence, and mattering. Instructor interactions were helpful, with underrepresented and first-generation students highlighting the importance of establishing course climate. LAs were crucial for belonging among underrepresented students, first-generation students, and continuing-generation women, but not for continuinggeneration men. Shared academic identities were universally important, while shared gender and racial identities held greater significance for underrepresented and firstgeneration students. Experiences with peers varied, with negative peer interactions and fear of judgment having less impact on well-represented, continuing-generation students. These findings extend Dewsbury's Deep Teaching model by demonstrating how LA integration into STEM courses can support student experiences across diverse populations. The results also reveal how instructors and LA programs can adapt their practices to support all students, ultimately enhancing belonging, confidence, and mattering.
