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Understanding the relationship between science and society is an objective of science education and is included as a core competency in the AAAS Vision and Change guidelines for biology education. However, traditional undergraduate biology instruction emphasizes scientific practice and generally avoids potentially controversial issues at the intersection of biology and society. By including these topics in biology coursework, instructors can challenge damaging ideologies and systemic inequalities that have influenced science, such as biological essentialism and health disparities. Specifically, an ideologically aware curriculum highlights how ideologies and paradigms shape our biological knowledge base and the application of that knowledge. Ideologically aware lessons emphasize the relationship between science and society with an aim to create more transparent, scientifically accurate, and inclusive postsecondary biology classrooms. Here we expand upon our ideologically aware curriculum with a new activity that challenges undergraduate biology students to consider the impacts of healthcare disparities. This lesson allows instructors to directly address systemic inequalities and allows students to connect biomedical sciences to real-world issues. Implementing an ideologically aware curriculum enables students to challenge prevailing worldviews and better address societal problems that lead to exclusion and oppression.
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This content will become publicly available on September 1, 2026
Student Perceptions on the Value of an Ideologically Aware Curriculum
Recent efforts to make undergraduate biology more inclusive include developing content that explores how human values and priorities impact science, and previous work documents how instructors value an “ideologically aware” biology curriculum that highlights these themes. Here, we surveyed a national sample of undergraduate students in biology classes to explore student perceptions of Ideological Awareness via a mixed-methods investigation. Through quantitative analyses, we found that women students, transgender or gender nonconforming students, and students majoring in biology or another science field were more likely to support the inclusion of Ideological Awareness in the biology classroom. We used expectancy value theory to guide our qualitative interpretations of student survey responses. Specifically, students’ expectancy of success and the intrinsic value they attach to ideologically aware content influenced their overall acceptance and advocacy for its integration into the curriculum. Students reported valuing Ideological Awareness because it can increase awareness and decrease biases. The most frequently cited cost was the potential for Ideological Awareness to elicit negative emotions. We compared results with similar or identical questions on a national survey distributed to biology instructors, which showed general alignment between students and instructors. These results support the incorporation of Ideological Awareness in biology education, emphasizing the need for more research on the implementation of inclusive content to address potential challenges.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2120934
- PAR ID:
- 10646099
- Editor(s):
- Bolger, Molly S
- Publisher / Repository:
- NA
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- CBE—Life Sciences Education
- Volume:
- 24
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 1931-7913
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Abstract Understanding the relationship between science and society is an objective of science education and is included as a core competency in the AAAS Vision and Change guidelines for biology education. However, traditional undergraduate biology instruction emphasizes scientific practice and generally avoids potentially controversial issues at the intersection of biology and society. By including these topics in biology coursework, instructors can challenge damaging ideologies and systemic inequalities that have influenced science, such as biological essentialism and health disparities. Specifically, an ideologically aware curriculum highlights how ideologies and paradigms shape our biological knowledge base and the application of that knowledge. Ideologically aware lessons emphasize the relationship between science and society with an aim to create more transparent, scientifically accurate, and inclusive postsecondary biology classrooms. Here we expand upon our ideologically aware curriculum with a new activity that challenges undergraduate biology students to consider the impacts of healthcare disparities. This lesson allows instructors to directly address systemic inequalities and allows students to connect biomedical sciences to real-world issues. Implementing an ideologically aware curriculum enables students to challenge prevailing worldviews and better address societal problems that lead to exclusion and oppression.more » « less
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Bolger, Molly (Ed.)Traditional biology curricula depict science as an objective field, overlooking the important influence that human values and biases have on what is studied and who can be a scientist. We can work to address this shortcoming by incorporating ideological awareness into the curriculum, which is an understanding of biases, stereotypes, and assumptions that shape contemporary and historical science. We surveyed a national sample of lower-level biology instructors to determine 1) why it is important for students to learn science, 2) the perceived educational value of ideological awareness in the classroom, and 3) hesitancies associated with ideological awareness implementation. We found that most instructors reported “understanding the world” as the main goal of science education. Despite the perceived value of ideological awareness, such as increasing student engagement and dispelling misconceptions, instructors were hesitant to implement ideological awareness modules due to potential personal and professional consequences.more » « less
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Understanding the relationship between science and society is included as a core competency for biology students in the United States. However, traditional undergraduate biology instruction emphasizes scientific practice and generally avoids potentially controversial issues at the intersection of science and society, such as representation in STEM, historical unethical research experiments, biology of sex and gender, and environmental justice. As calls grow to highlight this core competency, it is critical we investigate the impact of including these topics in undergraduate biology education. Here, we implemented a semester-long ideological awareness curriculum that emphasized biases, stereotypes, and assumptions that have shaped historical and contemporary science. We taught this curriculum to one section of a non-majors introductory biology course and compared the outcomes to a section of the same course taught using traditional biology content (hereafter the ‘traditional’ section) that did not emphasize societal topics. Both sections of students created concept maps for their final exam, which we coded for ‘society’ and ‘biology’ content. We then assessed (1) the amount of societal content included in the concept maps, and (2) which societal topics were mentioned in each section. We found that students in the ideologically aware section included more societal content in their concept maps than the students in the traditional section. Students exposed to the ideological awareness modules often mentioned the topics covered in those modules, whereas students in the traditional section most commonly mentioned faulty scientific information such as pseudoscience or non-credible research, which was emphasized in the first chapter of the required text-book for both sections. Our results show students who were not engaged in activities about ideological awareness in biology had fewer notions of how society impacts science at the end of the semester. These findings highlight the importance of intentionally teaching students the bidirectional impacts of science and society.more » « less
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Georgiou, H. (Ed.)Addressing the challenges facing society and the world will require an understanding of the biases and limitations of science. To combat these challenges, here, we advocate for the incorporation of ideologically aware (IA) material into postsecondary biology curricula. IA materials communicate to students how biases, assumptions, and stereotypes inform approaches to and outcomes of science. By engaging with IA materials, student awareness of the impact of science on social problems is expected to increase. In this paper, we situate this IA approach with two other pedagogical approaches that incorporate societally relevant content: culturally relevant pedagogy and socioscientific issues. We then call for research to test ways of supporting instructor implementation of IA material, to evaluate the impact of IA topics on student academic and sociopsychological outcomes, and to explore how to implement IA material in different cultural and social settings. Throughout, we focus on IA topics in the context of postsecondary biology classrooms but encourage the incorporation of IA materials across scientific disciplines and educational settings. Our hope is that greater inclusion of IA materials will create more transparent, scientifically accurate, and inclusive classrooms.more » « less
