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.

We examine the impact of Biology Mentoring and Engagement (BIOME) near-peer mentorship on 437 first-year undergraduate students over three cohort years. The BIOME course consists of ten, 50-minute meetings where groups of six first-year mentees meet with an upper-division student mentor to discuss topics including metacognition, growth mindset, and effective study strategies. We employed a mixed-methods approach to evaluate the impact of BIOME on mentee academic outcomes. Initial ethnographic analysis revealed that BIOME influenced student study methods, approaches to academic challenges, and use of campus learning communities. We then constructed a novel, program-specific instrument to measure the implementation of these habits, a construct we named “academic habit complexity.” Regression analysis supported the hypothesis that enrollment in BIOME leads to students using more diverse approaches than their peers. Enrollment in BIOME, and the associated development of academic habit complexity, is related to higher course grades in General Chemistry, a biology major prerequisite. Finally, students participating in BIOME demonstrated improved short-term student retention as measured by increased enrollment in the subsequent prerequisite General Chemistry course. These results suggest that course-based near-peer mentorship may be an effective and scalable approach that can promote student academic success.

College students’ performance in introductory-level biology course work is an important predictor of ongoing persistence in the major. This study reports on a researcher–educator partnership that designed and compared two cocurricular workshops. Seventeen laboratory sections of an undergraduate biology course were randomly assigned to one of two educational interventions during the regularly scheduled lab class section after students had completed and received the results for the first exam. The baseline Metacognition intervention was an hourlong workshop focused on effective learning strategies and self-awareness in the learning process; the extended Metacognition plus Time Management (Metacognition+TM) intervention included the aforementioned workshop plus a second hourlong workshop on time management and procrastination. Based on three exams and self-report surveys administered before the intervention and at the end of the semester, students who participated in the Metacognition+TM intervention experienced greater increases in their exam scores and degree commitment than those in the baseline intervention. Additionally, group status moderated the effect of the intervention, as the Metacognition+TM intervention was especially effective in increasing use of time management tools by students from minoritized groups.

What goes into faculty decisions to adopt a classroom intervention that closes achievement gaps? We present a theoretical model for understanding possible resistance to and support for implementing and sustaining a diversity-enhancing classroom intervention. We propose, examine, and refine a “diversity interventions—resistance to action” model with four key inputs that help explain faculty’s decision to implement (or not) an evidence-based intervention: 1) notice that underrepresentation is a problem, 2) interpret underrepresentation as needing immediate action, 3) assume responsibility, and 4) know how to help. Using an embedded mixed-methods design, we worked with a sample of 40 biology faculty from across the United States who participated in in-depth, semistructured, qualitative interviews and surveys. Survey results offer initial support for the model, showing that the inputs are associated with faculty’s perceived value of and implementation intentions for a diversity-enhancing classroom intervention. Findings from qualitative narratives provide rich contextual information that illuminates how faculty think about diversity and classroom interventions. The diversity interventions—resistance to action model highlights the explicit role of faculty as systemic gatekeepers in field-wide efforts to diversify biology education, and findings point to strategies for overcoming different aspects of faculty resistance in order to scale up diversity-enhancing classroom interventions.

Scientist Spotlights—curricular materials that employ the personal and professional stories of scientists from diverse backgrounds—have previously been shown to positively influence undergraduate students’ relatability to and perceptions of scientists. We hypothesized that engaging students in authoring Scientist Spotlights might produce curricular materials of similar impact, as well as provide a mechanism for student involvement as partners in science education reform. To test this idea and investigate the impact of student-authored Scientist Spotlights, we developed a service-learning course in which teams of biology students partnered with an instructor to develop and implement Scientist Spotlights in a biology course. Results revealed that exposure to three or four student-authored Scientist Spotlights significantly shifted peers’ perceptions of scientists in all partner courses. Interestingly, student-authored Scientist Spotlights shifted peers’ relatability to scientists similarly among both white students and students of color. Further, student authors themselves showed increases in their relatability to scientists. Finally, a department-wide survey demonstrated significant differences in students’ perceptions of scientist representation between courses with and without student-authored Spotlights. Results suggest that engaging students as authors of inclusive curricular materials and partners in reform is a promising approach to promoting inclusion and addressing representation in science.

To enhance equity and diversity in undergraduate biology, recent research in biology education focuses on best practices that reduce learning barriers for all students and improve academic performance. However, the majority of current research into student experiences in introductory biology takes place at large, predominantly White institutions. To foster contextual knowledge in biology education research, we harnessed data from a large research coordination network to examine the extent of academic performance gaps based on demographic status across institutional contexts and how two psychological factors, test anxiety and ethnicity stigma consciousness, may mediate performance in introductory biology. We used data from seven institutions across three institution types: 2-year community colleges, 4-year inclusive institutions (based on admissions selectivity; hereafter, inclusive), and 4-year selective institutions (hereafter, selective). In our sample, we did not observe binary gender gaps across institutional contexts, but found that performance gaps based on underrepresented minority status were evident at inclusive and selective 4-year institutions, but not at community colleges. Differences in social psychological factors and their impacts on academic performance varied substantially across institutional contexts. Our findings demonstrate that institutional context can play an important role in the mechanisms underlying performance gaps.

Anxiety is the top mental health concern for undergraduates. While researchers have identified ways that in-person science courses can affect anxiety, little is known about how online science courses affect anxiety. In this study, 2111 undergraduates at a large research-intensive institution completed survey questions about their anxiety in large-enrollment online science courses. Specifically, we assessed students’ anxiety in the context of online science courses and asked what aspects of online science courses increase and decrease their anxiety. Students also identified what instructors can do to lessen anxiety in online classrooms. We used open coding and logistic regression to analyze student responses. More than 50% of students reported at least moderate anxiety in the context of online college science courses. Students commonly reported that the potential for personal technology issues (69.8%) and proctored exams (68.0%) increased their anxiety, while being able to access content at a later time (79.0%) and attending class from where they want (74.2%) decreased their anxiety. The most common ways that students suggested that instructors could decrease student anxiety is to increase test-taking flexibility (25.0%) and be understanding (23.1%). This study provides insight into how instructors can create more inclusive online learning environments for students with anxiety.

Instructor Talk—the noncontent language used by an instructor during class time—is likely to influence learning environments in science classrooms from the student perspective. Despite Instructor Talk being found in every science course thus far, investigations into student perceptions and memories of it are limited. We investigated to what extent undergraduate biology students 1) were aligned with researchers in their perceptions of Instructor Talk as Positively Phrased or Negatively Phrased and 2) remembered Instructor Talk. To test these ideas, we engaged 90 biology students in a multipart assessment. First, students were given randomly selected Instructor Talk quotes, half Positively Phrased and half Negatively Phrased, and were asked to evaluate each quote as promoting a positive or negative learning environment. Overall, students evaluated the Instructor Talk quotes similarly to researchers’ categorizations (p < 0.0001). Second, students were asked to provide examples of remembered instructor language from their biology courses that they felt promoted a positive or negative learning environment. Most students shared multiple memories, and ∼75% of these memories could be coded with the Instructor Talk frameworks. Given that students perceive and remember Instructor Talk as impacting the learning environment, Instructor Talk may be an explanatory variable for differential student outcomes across studies of active learning.

While science has profound social impacts, we often teach biology as removed from societally debated issues. Here, we address this gap in biology education through the implementation of novel materials that promote ideological awareness (IA). Using mixed-method analyses, we explore students’ perceptions of the relationship between science and society, as well as their attitudes toward and knowledge of IA in biology. We found students that received the IA curriculum reported relationships between science and society that aligned with the IA activities, such as providing solutions to societal problems and combating misinformation. Additionally, we discovered a preference for IA materials over a traditional curriculum, with persons excluded because of their ethnicity and race (PEERs) reporting greater approval than non-PEERs. Although we found that the IA curriculum did not result in significant gains in science identity, engagement in biology, or science community values, we did find that students gained awareness of IA topics through a task in which they named as many scientists as possible. Specifically, IA students displayed a 300% increase in the frequency of named scientists from minoritized backgrounds compared with the traditionally taught students. We encourage instructors to incorporate IA materials into their curricula as we move toward more diverse, equitable, and inclusive teaching practices.

Problem solving is a critical skill in many disciplines but is often a challenge for students to learn. To examine the processes both students and experts undertake to solve constructed-response problems in genetics, we collected the written step-by-step procedures individuals used to solve problems in four different content areas. We developed a set of codes to describe each cognitive and metacognitive process and then used these codes to describe more than 1800 student and 149 expert answers. We found that students used some processes differently depending on the content of the question, but reasoning was consistently predictive of successful problem solving across all content areas. We also confirmed previous findings that the metacognitive processes of planning and checking were more common in expert answers than student answers. We provide suggestions for instructors on how to highlight key procedures based on each specific genetics content area that can help students learn the skill of problem solving.

Calculus is typically one of the first college courses encountered by science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors. Calculus often presents major challenges affecting STEM student persistence, particularly for students from groups historically underrepresented in STEM. For life sciences majors, calculus courses may not offer content that is relevant to biological systems or connect with students’ interests in biology. We developed a transformative approach to teaching college-level math, using a dynamical systems perspective that focuses first on demonstrating why students need math to understand living systems, followed by providing quantitative and computational skills, including concepts from calculus, that students need to build and analyze mathematical models representing these systems. We found that students who complete these new math courses perform better in subsequent science courses than their counterparts who take traditional calculus courses. We also provide evidence that the new math curriculum positively impacts students’ academic performance, with data that show narrowing of the achievement gap, based on students’ math grades, between student subgroups in the new math courses. Moreover, our results indicate that students’ interest in the concepts and skills critical to the quantitative preparation of 21st-century life sciences majors increases after completing the new contextualized math curriculum.

Concepts of molecular biology and genetics are difficult for many biology undergraduate students to master yet are crucial for deep understanding of how life works. By asking students to draw their ideas, we attempted to uncover the mental models about genes and gene expression held by biology students (n = 23) and experts (n = 18) using semistructured interviews. A large divide was identified between novice and expert conceptions. While experts typically drew box-and-line representations and thought about genes as regions of DNA that were used to encode products, students typically drew whole chromosomes rather than focusing on gene structure and conflated gene expression with simple phenotypic outcomes. Experts universally described gene expression as a set of molecular processes involving transcription and translation, whereas students often associated gene expression with Punnett squares and phenotypic outcomes. Follow-up survey data containing a ranking question confirmed students’ alignment of their mental models with the images uncovered during interviews (n = 156 undergraduate biology students) and indicated that Advanced students demonstrate a shift toward expert-like thinking. An analysis of 14 commonly used biology textbooks did not show any relationship between Punnett squares and discussions of gene expression, so it is doubtful students’ ideas originate directly from textbook reading assignments. Our findings add to the literature about mechanistic reasoning abilities of learners and provide new insights into how biology students think about genes and gene expression.

Evidence-based teaching practices (EBPs) foster college science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) students’ engagement and performance, yet our knowledge of what contributes to the effectiveness of these practices is less established. We propose a framework that links four social-cognitive variables—students’ trust in their instructors, growth mindset, buy-in to instructional practices, and course engagement—to long-standing desired student outcomes of academic performance and intent to persist in science. This framework was tested in classrooms identified as having a high level of EBP implementation with a multi-institutional sample of 2102 undergraduates taught by 14 faculty members. Results indicate that the buy-in framework is a valid representation of college students’ learning experiences within EBP contexts overall as well as across underrepresented student groups. In comparison to students’ level of growth mindset, students’ trust in their instructors was more than twice as predictive of buy-in to how the course was being taught, suggesting that students’ views of their instructors are more associated with thriving in a high-EBP course environment than their views of intelligence. This study contributes to the dialogue on transforming undergraduate STEM education by providing a validated student buy-in framework as a lens to understand how EBPs enhance student outcomes.

Scientific research has a culture that can be challenging to enter. Different aspects of this culture may act as barriers or entry points for different people. Recognition of these barriers and entry points requires identifying aspects of the culture of scientific research and synthesizing them into a single, descriptive framework. A systematic literature review encompassing a two-pronged search strategy, descriptive mapping of ideas, and consensus building, was performed to identify aspects of scientific research culture. This resulted in the Culture of Scientific Research (CSR) Framework, composed of 31 cultural aspects categorized as either Practices, Norms/Expectations, or Values/Beliefs. Additional evidence of validity was collected through a survey that asked biological researchers to indicate which aspects in the framework were relevant to their experiences of research. The majority of survey respondents (n = 161) perceived the 31 aspects in the CSR Framework as relevant to biological research. This framework provides a consistent structure for describing the experiences of people engaging with the culture of scientific research. The literature review included literature from multiple disciplines, so the CSR Framework should be broadly applicable. Future applications of the CSR Framework include identifying possible barriers and entry points experienced by groups currently underrepresented in scientific research.

Modeling is a scientific practice that supports creative reasoning, motivates inquiry, and facilitates community sense-making. This paper explores students’ perspectives on modeling in an undergraduate laboratory course, Authentic Inquiry through Modeling (AIM-Bio), in which they proposed, tested, and revised their own models. We conducted comparative case studies of eight students over a semester. Students described using models to support multiple forms of scientific reasoning and hypothesis generation. They recounted the challenges of dealing with uncertainty and integrating diverse ideas. They also described how these challenges pushed their thinking. Overall, students reported feeling a sense of scientific authenticity and agency through their modeling experience. We additionally provide an in-depth look at two students whose unique experiences in AIM-Bio emphasize the variable ways modeling can support inquiry learning. We claim that modeling emerged as a legitimate practice among students, because the AIM-Bio curriculum encouraged diversity in students’ models, provided opportunities for students to grapple with uncertainty, and fostered collaboration between students. We suggest that biology educators consider how model-based inquiry can allow students to participate in science, as a way to support interest in, identification with, and ultimately persistence in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields.

Knowledge construction is an essential scientific practice, and undergraduate research experiences (UREs) provide opportunities for students to engage with this scientific practice in an authentic context. While participating in UREs, students develop conceptualizations about how science gathers, evaluates, and constructs knowledge (science epistemology) that align with scientific practice. However, there have been few studies focusing on how students’ science epistemologies develop during these experiences. Through the analysis of written reflections and three research papers and by leveraging methods informed by collaborative autoethnography, we construct a case study of one student, describing the development of her science epistemology and scientific agency during her time participating in a biology education URE. Through her reflections and self-analysis, the student describes her context-dependent science epistemology, and how she discovered a new role as a critic of scientific papers. These results have implications for the use of written reflections to facilitate epistemic development during UREs and the role of classroom culture in the development of scientific agency.

Following professional development (PD), implementation of contemporary topics into high school biology requires teachers to make critical decisions regarding integration of novel content into existing course scope and sequence. Often exciting topics, such as neuroscience, do not perfectly align with standards. Despite commitment to enacting what was learned in the PD, teachers must adapt novel content to their perceptions of good teaching, local context, prior knowledge of their students, and state and district expectations. How teachers decide to integrate curricula encountered from PD programs may affect student outcomes. This mixed-methods study examined the relationship between curricular application strategies following an inquiry-based neuroscience PD and student learning. Post-PD curricular implementation was measured qualitatively through analysis of teacher action plans and classroom observations and quantitatively using hierarchical linear modeling to determine the impact of implementation on student performance. Participation in neuroscience PD predicted improved student learning compared with control teachers. Of the two distinct curricular implementation strategies, enacting a full unit produced significantly greater student learning than integrating neuroscience activities into existing biology units. Insights from this analysis should inform teacher implementation of new curricula after PD on other contemporary biology topics.

Recent evidence suggests a mental health crisis among graduate students, particularly with regard to anxiety. To manage anxieties, graduate students can employ coping strategies. Coping is an individual’s response(s) to external stressors, often with the goal of reducing or tolerating the stress; these strategies are generally considered adaptive or maladaptive. Adaptive coping strategies advance individuals through problems, while maladaptive strategies prevent stressors from being resolved. We previously identified differences between teaching and research anxieties in a sample of biology graduate teaching assistants (GTAs). This study investigated whether coping with these anxieties differed in this population as well. We interviewed 23 biology GTAs twice over one year. Interview data were qualitatively analyzed using Skinner and colleagues’ major coping families as categories. Biology GTAs most often used adaptive coping strategies, such as problem solving and information seeking, to manage both teaching and research anxieties. However, other coping strategies were preferentially employed for either teaching or research, suggesting differences in these aspects of graduate student life. Over one year, GTAs reduced the number of coping strategies they employed. Understanding how GTAs cope with teaching and research anxieties may inform the types of support faculty and professional development leaders can provide to graduate students.

Despite growing evidence of positive student outcomes from course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs), little consideration has been given to employing graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) as CURE instructors. GTAs may be novice researchers and/or teachers and likely vary in their interest in teaching a CURE. Guided by expectancy-value theory, we explored how GTAs’ self-efficacy and values regarding teaching a CURE impact motivation and perceptions of their roles as CURE instructors. Using a multiple case study design, we interviewed nine GTAs who taught a network CURE at one research institution. Though most GTAs held a relatively high value for teaching a CURE for a range of reasons, some GTAs additionally perceived high costs associated with teaching the CURE. Through the interview data, we established three profiles to describe GTA perceptions of their role as CURE instructors: “Student Supporters,” “Research Mentors,” and “Content Deliverers.” Those implementing GTA-led CUREs should consider that GTAs likely have different perceptions of both their role in the classroom and the associated costs of teaching a CURE. The variability in GTA perceptions of CUREs implies that undergraduate students of different GTAs are unlikely to experience the CURE equivalently.

The Science Teaching Experience Program–Working in Science Education (STEP-WISE) provides teaching experience for postdoctoral scholars holding full-time research appointments. Through a combination of mentorship, deliberate practice, and feedback, the postdocs learn and apply inclusive, evidence-based pedagogies. STEP-WISE is integrated into postdocs’ demanding schedules and is sustainable for institutions to run. Here, we assess the effectiveness of STEP-WISE. We used the Classroom Observation Protocol for Undergraduate STEM instruction to quantify instructor and student behaviors in 20 STEP-WISE class sessions from seven courses designed and taught by postdocs in the program. We found that all of the postdocs used student-centered teaching strategies. Also, using a design-based research framework, we studied the program to identify the salient components of its design. Four interconnected key elements contribute to the program’s success: 1) two training sessions, 2) a precourse meeting with the mentor, 3) implementation of active-learning strategies with support, and 4) debriefing with the mentor after each class session. STEP-WISE is a replicable model to support postdocs seeking training and experience in evidence-based teaching practices geared to improving undergraduate education and transforming pedagogical practice. We conclude that high-impact teaching can be learned early in a career with streamlined training and intensive mentoring.