The purpose of the Current Insights feature is to highlight recent research and scholarship from outside the LSE community. In this installment, I review a series of recently published articles which examine ethical dilemmas concerning the use of artificial intelligence (AI), more specifically machine learning, in science education. The articles in this set are intended to stimulate discussions about whether and how AI can and should be used in education research.

Graphs are ubiquitous tools in science that allow one to explore data patterns, design studies, communicate findings, and make claims. This essay is a companion to the online, evidence-based interactive guide intended to help inform instructors’ decision-making in how to teach graph reading, interpretation, construction, and evaluation within the discipline of biology. We provide a framework with a focus on six instructional practices that instructors can utilize when designing graphing activities: use data to engage students, teach graphing grounded in the discipline, practice explicit instruction, use real world “messy” data, utilize collaborative work, and emphasize reflection. Each component of this guide is supported by summaries of and links to articles that can inform graphing practices. The guide also contains an instructor checklist that summarizes key points with actionable steps that can guide instructors as they work towards refining and incorporating graphing into their classroom practice and emerging questions in which further empirical studies are warranted.

Change theory has increasingly become an area of scholarship in STEM education. While this area has traditionally been a topic for organizational psychology, business management, communication studies, and higher education, STEM education researchers are increasingly aware of the need to use formal theories to guide change efforts and research. Formal change theory encompasses our current research-based knowledge about how and why change occurs, and therefore, can guide the selection and design of promising interventions. Yet learning about and using theory is challenging because many of us have no formal training in this area and relevant scholarship comes from many different disciplines. Inconsistent terminology creates an additional barrier. Thus, this essay aims to contribute to a common lexicon in STEM higher educational change efforts by clearly distinguishing between formalized change theory, which emerges from research, and a theory of change, which guides the logic of a specific project. We also briefly review the current state of the field regarding the use of formal change theory and provide examples of how change theory has been used in biology education. Lastly, we offer practical guidance for researchers and change agents who wish to more intentionally and effectively use change theory in their work.

Many students who enroll in a public U.S. 4-y college will not graduate. The odds of completing a college degree are even lower for students who have been marginalized in higher education, especially in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) fields. Can undergraduate research increase a student’s likelihood of graduating college and close educational equity gaps in college completion? To answer this question, we use data from six public U.S. universities (N = 120,308 students) and use Propensity Score Matching to generate a comparison group for analyses. We conducted logistic regressions on graduation rates and equity gaps in 4 and 6 y using the matched comparison group and undergraduate researchers in STEM (n = 2727). When being compared with like-peers and controlling for background characteristics and prior academic performance, students who participated in undergraduate research were twice as likely to graduate in 4 y and over 10 times as likely to graduate in 6 y. We also found that equity gaps in 4-y graduation rates for students of color, low-income, and first-generation students were cut in half for undergraduate researchers. At 6 y, these gaps were completely closed for undergraduate researchers. As we seek ways to close education gaps and increase graduation rates, undergraduate research can be a meaningful practice to improve student success.

Understanding attitudes towards anthropogenic disturbances, especially among undergraduates, is important to inform educational practices because of the theoretical link between attitude and behavior. We evaluated the attitudes of undergraduate students in a biology majors course and nonmajors course toward two anthropogenic disturbances: wildfire and urbanization. Student attitudes were assessed via an online Wildfire and Urbanization Attitude survey (WUAS) before and after a video intervention, randomly delivered as either fact- or emotion-based versions. Student beliefs regarding wildfire and urbanization were positively correlated with their general intention to act toward environmental issues on both pre- and postintervention surveys, as suggested by theory. Student belief that urbanization was bad for the environment increased from pre- to postintervention. However, beliefs and intention to act did not statistically differ between majors/nonmajors or intervention video type. This study hints that brief interventions can impact student disturbance beliefs, but more research is needed to guide curriculum development. Despite some research suggesting the value of emotion to inspire climate action, our results suggest that more work needs to be done regarding the value of emotion to increase environmental action toward other anthropogenic disturbances.

Active learning approaches to biology teaching, including simulation-based activities, are known to enhance student learning, especially of higher-order skills; nonetheless, there are still many open questions about what features of an activity promote optimal learning. Here we designed three versions of a simulation-based tutorial called Understanding Experimental Design that asks students to design experiments and collect data to test their hypotheses. The three versions vary the experimental design task along the axes of feedback and constraint, where constraint measures how much choice students have in performing a task. Using a variety of assessments, we ask whether each of those features affects student learning of experimental design. We find that feedback has a direct positive effect on learning. We further find that small changes in constraint have only subtle and mostly indirect effects on learning. This work suggests that designers of tools for teaching higher-order skills should strive to include feedback to increase impact and may feel freer to vary the degree of constraint within a range to optimize for other features such as the ability to provide immediate feedback and time-on-task.

Preparing for exams in introductory biology classrooms is a complex metacognitive task. Focusing on lower achieving students (those with entering ACT scores below the median at our institution), we compared the effect of two different assignments distributed ahead of exams by dividing classes in half to receive either terms to define or open-ended metacognitive questions. Completing metacognitive assignments resulted in moderately higher exam scores for students on the second and third exams. Metacognitive assignments also improved accuracy (difference between predicted and actual exam scores) for the second and third exam in lower ACT students, but that improvement was driven largely by higher exam scores in the metacognitive group. Thus, despite the fact that the metacognitive assignments specifically asked students to reflect on their previous exam performance, their previous estimates and predict how well they expected to perform on the exam they were preparing for, there was little evidence that these assignments influenced lower achieving students’ confidence levels any more than assignments where students defined terms. While understanding relevant terms was certainly important in this course, these results highlight that open-ended metacognitive prompts may improve exam scores in some students in introductory biology classrooms.

Discipline-based education research (DBER) has experienced dramatic growth over recent years, but with growth comes concerns about whether DBER efforts accurately represent the education landscape. By many measures, DBER does not feature a representative range of institutional contexts or a diverse array of voices. Numerous professional development efforts have sought to broaden DBER participation. However, few studies investigate factors that increase engagement by individuals from underrepresented contexts. Drawing on theory related to belonging, self-efficacy, and social learning communities, we investigated persistence in an affinity group aimed at engaging community college faculty (CCF) in biology education research (BER). CCF and CC contexts are dramatically underrepresented in BER in comparison to their central positioning in higher education. We conducted a 4-y study of CCF participants’ sense of belonging, self-efficacy, and network connectivity. Our results suggest a relationship between social connectivity, belonging, and persistence in the community, indicating an increase of either of these factors may increase persistence. Self-efficacy increased alongside belonging within the affinity group, which correlated with belonging in BER broadly. These results might inform efforts to engage underrepresented groups of DBER scholars and suggest that such efforts go beyond provision of resources and skills, to focus on building social connections.

The cognitive and performance benefits of group work in undergraduate courses depend on understanding how to structure groups to promote communication and comfort while also promoting diversity and reducing conflict. The current study utilized social network analysis combined with self-reported survey data from 555 students in 155 groups to understand how students identified group members whom they wished to work with. Students’ willingness to work with their peers was positively associated with behavioral traits pertaining to attention, participation, and preparedness in class. We tested whether preventing students from choosing their group members until completing a multiweek period of random assignment to different groups each week influenced group selection criteria, and we found little effect. Students continued to depend on demographic similarities such as gender and ethnicity when selecting groupmates and enforcing random interactions before the group formation did not influence group satisfaction and/or grades. Random interactions before group formation did influence the willingness of students to continue working with peers who were persistently poorly rated based on behavioral attributes and contribution to the group work. Thus, the effort of random assignment could be beneficial to identify struggling students and improve collaboration.

The tension between religion and science as a long-standing barrier to science education has led researchers to explore ways of improving the experiences of Christian students in biology who can experience their Christianity as stigmatized in academic biology environments. As undergraduate science classes become student-centered, interactions among students increase, and Christians may feel a need to conceal their religious identities during peer discussions. In this interview study, we used the social psychology framework of concealable stigmatized identities to explore 30 Christian students’ experiences during peer interactions in undergraduate biology courses to find potential ways to improve those experiences. We found that students felt their religious identity was salient during peer interactions in biology, and students thought revealing their religious identity to peers in their biology courses could be beneficial, yet few actually did so. Additionally, though most students anticipated stigma, comparatively few had experienced stigma from other students in their biology courses, despite the prior documented cultural stigma against Christians in biology. These results indicate a need for future studies exploring the impact of learning environments in which students are given the opportunity to share their religious identities with one another, which could reduce their anticipated and perceived stigma.

STEM undergraduates navigate lengthy sequences of prerequisite courses covering volumes of science content. Given that these courses may contribute to attrition and equity gaps in STEM, research is needed to test the assumption that prerequisite content benefits students in their future studies and careers. We investigated the relevance of prerequisite course content for students’ careers through semistructured interviews with practicing nurses regarding their undergraduate anatomy and physiology (A&P) courses. Nurses reported that A&P content does not align with the skills and knowledge needed in the nursing profession. Interviewees averaged 39% on a brief A&P assessment, suggesting A&P prerequisites failed to impart a high degree of long-term A&P knowledge among nurses. Further, practicing nurses perceived overcommitment to A&P content coverage as an exclusionary practice that eliminates capable individuals from the prenursing pathway. These findings challenge assumptions surrounding the justification for prerequisite course content and raise questions of whether content expectations actively exclude individuals from STEM or healthcare careers. We aspire for this study to stimulate conversation and research about the goals of prerequisite content, who is best positioned to articulate prerequisite content objectives, and the influence of content coverage on equity and justice in undergraduate STEM education.

Students struggle to regulate their learning during independent study sessions. In this study, we ask whether an online behavioral intervention helped introductory students decrease distraction while studying. The intervention consisted of exam 1 reflection, exam 2 planning, and exam 2 reflection exercises. During planning, students formed a goal, mentally contrasted (MC) a positive outcome of their goal to their present reality, identified an obstacle, and formed an implementation intention (II) to overcome that obstacle. During reflection, students self-reported their distraction while studying. Distraction was the most frequently reported study obstacle, and decreasing distraction was the second most frequently reported study goal. While students who aimed to decrease distraction as a goal did not follow through, students who planned for distraction obstacles did follow through on decreasing distraction levels. Only about half of students generated an II that aligned with their study goal, which may provide one reason for the opposing follow-through of distraction framed as a goal versus as an obstacle. Lastly, we examined the specificity of students’ II’s and found no relationship with follow-through. Overall, MC with II holds promise as a self-regulatory technique to help introductory biology students change their behaviors while studying.

Genetic variation is historically challenging for undergraduate students to master, potentially due to its grounding in both evolution and genetics. Traditionally, student expertise in genetic variation has been evaluated using Key Concepts. However, Cognitive Construals may add to a more nuanced picture of students’ developing expertise. Here, we analyze the occurrence of Key Concepts and Cognitive Construals among three types of student representations: interviews, drawn models, and constructed responses (CRs). Our mixed-methods analysis indicates that differential survival and differential reproduction occur more often in interviews than in CRs. In our interviews, presence of Cognitive Construals indicate varying levels of understanding of genetic variation, but we were not able to detect Cognitive Construals in students’ models or CRs. Finally, our analyses of both Key Concepts and Cognitive Construals in student representations indicate that Cognitive Construals can co-occur with any number of Key Concepts, and that the presence of Construal-based language alone does not seem to correlate to the expert nature of a response. Taken together, our results highlight the need for instructors to avoid treating Construal-based language as implicit disconnects in student understanding, and to use multiple methods to gain a holistic picture of student expertise.

A “critical access point in the STEM pipeline for Latinx students and other students of color” (), community colleges provide a seminal breeding ground for academic pursuits (). However, how personal networks influence STEM pathways of two-year college students remains largely unexplored. This mixed methods case study explores influence of personal networks on pursuing STEM fields via social network analysis and qualitative narratives. 36 women of color STEM majors at a two-year urban Hispanic-Serving Institution were interviewed via social network questionnaire. Participants nominated anyone who has influenced their STEM trajectory, which signifies influence to their reason for pursuing a STEM path; they also had an option to qualitatively elaborate on any nomination but this was not required. Nominations were counted towards degree centrality and categorized into social relationships. Participants nominated diverse relationship influences, with family as the most influential relationship group, followed by college faculty/staff. Qualitative narratives revealed that family influenced participants, regardless of relatives’ educational attainment level at the high school or lower level. In alignment with community cultural wealth, family members provided the impetus for pursuing STEM pathways through influence on participants’ (1) aspirational capital, (2) familial capital, and (3) resistant capital.