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Genetic essentialism of race is the belief that racial groups have different underlying genetic essences which cause them to differ physically, cognitively, or behaviorally. Apparently no published studies have explored if belief in genetic essentialism of race among adolescents differs after many weeks of formal instruction about different domains of genetics knowledge. Nor have any studies explored if such differences reflect a coherent change in students’ racial schemas. We use a quasi-experimental design (N = 254 students in 7th-12th grade) to explore these gaps. Over the course of three months, we compared students who learned from a curriculum on multifactorial inheritance and genetic ancestry to students who learned from their business as usual (BAU) genetics curriculum that discussed Mendelian and molecular genetics without any reference to race, multifactorial genetics, or genetic ancestry. Relative to the BAU condition, classrooms that learned from the multifactorial genetics and ancestry curriculum grew significantly more in their knowledge of multifactorial genetics and decreased significantly more in their genetic essentialist perceptions, attributions, and beliefs. From a conceptual change perspective, these findings suggest that classrooms using a curriculum emphasizing genetic complexity are more likely to shift toward a coherent anti-essentialist understanding of racial difference.
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Investigating Conflation of Sex and Gender Language in Student Writing About Genetics
Conflation of sex and gender is implicated in the development of essentialist thinking, which has been linked to the justification of systems of prejudice in modern society. This exploratory study presents findings from a person randomized control trial conducted with 460 students in 8th–10th grade that investigated the extent to which students conflate sex and gender in their writing about genetics. Students were randomly assigned to one of three short readings that either (1) explained the genetics of sex in plants; (2) explained the genetics of sex in humans; or (3) refuted neuro-genetic essentialism, offering instead a social explanation for why women receive fewer PhDs in science, technology, mathematics, and engineering than men. While previous findings from the authors suggest links between the condition students were assigned to and psychological indicators related to essentialist thinking, no work was done to investigate how students’ use of language might implicate cognitive conflation as a possible factor in understanding these results. In this study, student responses to a constructed response writing task given after the reading were analyzed to investigate the use of sex and gender language. Students in all three conditions used both sex and gender language. However, students in the refutational text condition tended to use sex and gender language deliberately in order to explain PhD attainment, while students in the traditional genetics conditions used the terms interchangeably, suggesting subconscious conflation. Students in the genetics of human sex condition were more likely to manifest this conflation than students in the genetics of plant sex condition. Implications for instruction are discussed.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1956152
- PAR ID:
- 10250966
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Science and Education
- Volume:
- 29
- ISSN:
- 2181-0842
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1567 - 1594
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-020-00177-9
