Search for: All records

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. 

Evolution is controversial among students and religiosity, religious affiliation, understanding of evolution, and demographics are predictors of evolution acceptance. However, quantitative research has not explored the unique impact of student perceived conflict between their religion and evolution as a major factor influencing evolution acceptance. We developed an instrument with validity evidence called “Perceived Conflict between Evolution and Religion” (PCoRE). Using this measure, we find that, among students in 26 biology courses in 11 states, adding student perceived conflict between their religion and evolution to linear mixed models more than doubled the capacity of the models to predict evolution acceptance compared with models that only included religiosity, religious affiliation, understanding of evolution, and demographics. Student perceived conflict between evolution and their religion was the strongest predictor of evolution acceptance among all variables and mediated the impact of religiosity on evolution acceptance. These results build upon prior literature that suggests that reducing perceived conflict between students’ religious beliefs and evolution can help raise evolution acceptance levels. Further, these results indicate that including measures of perceived conflict between religion and evolution in evolution acceptance studies in the future is important.