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Research from undergraduate and K-12 environments suggests that providing meaningful support for Community College students requires faculty and staff to engage in ongoing self-reflection, peer support, and a commitment to research-based pedagogical shifts. Currently, California Community College (CCC) faculty and staff get very few of these opportunities. This study aims to address this issue through an intervention designed to provide opportunities for CCC faculty and staff to be part of a flexible, coherent professional learning community. The intervention is part of an NSF-funded research and development project at a community college in central California designated as a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI), with the goal of providing faculty and staff with tools and processes to support students toward higher retention and success in STEM by facilitating “micro-internships.” Micro-internships are designed to reduce inequalities inherent in the traditional internship paradigm by providing access to professional and research skills for students who do not have the opportunities and/or confidence to participate in a more traditional full-length internship. Conversations with participants showed how they embraced the design principles that were negotiated as a project team, and how one or more of the study interventions had played a powerful role in supporting their learning and development toward certain pedagogical shifts. Our results highlight the power of providing spaces such as summer workshops and ongoing “community of practice” meetings for collaboration, professional learning, and peer-to-peer mentorship. 

ABSTRACT Undergraduate genetics courses have historically focused on simple genetic models, rather than taking a more multifactorial approach where students explore how traits are influenced by a combination of genes, the environment, and gene-by-environment interactions. While a focus on simple genetic models can provide straightforward examples to promote student learning, they do not match the current scientific understanding and can result in deterministic thinking among students. In addition, undergraduates are often interested in complex human traits that are influenced by the environment, and national curriculum standards include learning objectives that focus on multifactorial concepts. This research aims to discover to what extent multifactorial genetics is currently being assessed in undergraduate genetics courses. To address this, we analyzed over 1,000 assessment questions from a commonly used undergraduate genetics textbook; published concept assessments; and open-source, peer-reviewed curriculum materials. Our findings show that current genetics assessment questions overwhelmingly emphasize the impact of genes on phenotypes and that the effect of the environment is rarely addressed. These results indicate a need for the inclusion of more multifactorial genetics concepts, and we suggest ways to introduce them into undergraduate courses. 

Abstract When people are exposed to information that leads them to overestimate the actual amount of genetic difference between racial groups, it can augment their racial biases. However, there is apparently no research that explores if the reverse is possible. Does teaching adolescents scientifically accurate information about genetic variation within and between US census races reduce their racial biases? We randomized 8^thand 9^thgrade students (n = 166) into separate classrooms to learn for an entire week either about the topics of (a) human genetic variation or (b) climate variation. In a cross‐over randomized trial with clustering, we demonstrate that when students learn about genetic variation within and between racial groups it significantly changes their perceptions of human genetic variation, thereby causing a significant decrease in their scores on instruments assessing cognitive forms of prejudice. We then replicate these findings in two computer‐based randomized controlled trials, one with adults (n = 176) and another with biology students (n = 721, 9^th–12^thgraders). These results indicate that teaching about human variation in the domain of genetics has potentially powerful effects on social cognition during adolescence. In turn, we argue that learning about the social and quantitative complexities of human genetic variation research could prepare students to become informed participants in a society where human genetics is invoked as a rationale in sociopolitical debates.