Understanding attitudes towards anthropogenic disturbances, especially among undergraduates, is important to inform educational practices because of the theoretical link between attitude and behavior. We evaluated the attitudes of undergraduate students in a biology majors course and nonmajors course toward two anthropogenic disturbances: wildfire and urbanization. Student attitudes were assessed via an online Wildfire and Urbanization Attitude survey (WUAS) before and after a video intervention, randomly delivered as either fact- or emotion-based versions. Student beliefs regarding wildfire and urbanization were positively correlated with their general intention to act toward environmental issues on both pre- and postintervention surveys, as suggested by theory. Student belief that urbanization was bad for the environment increased from pre- to postintervention. However, beliefs and intention to act did not statistically differ between majors/nonmajors or intervention video type. This study hints that brief interventions can impact student disturbance beliefs, but more research is needed to guide curriculum development. Despite some research suggesting the value of emotion to inspire climate action, our results suggest that more work needs to be done regarding the value of emotion to increase environmental action toward other anthropogenic disturbances.

The tension between religion and science as a long-standing barrier to science education has led researchers to explore ways of improving the experiences of Christian students in biology who can experience their Christianity as stigmatized in academic biology environments. As undergraduate science classes become student-centered, interactions among students increase, and Christians may feel a need to conceal their religious identities during peer discussions. In this interview study, we used the social psychology framework of concealable stigmatized identities to explore 30 Christian students' experiences during peer interactions in undergraduate biology courses to find potential ways to improve those experiences. We found that students felt their religious identity was salient during peer interactions in biology, and students thought revealing their religious identity to peers in their biology courses could be beneficial, yet few actually did so. Additionally, though most students anticipated stigma, comparatively few had experienced stigma from other students in their biology courses, despite the prior documented cultural stigma against Christians in biology. These results indicate a need for future studies exploring the impact of learning environments in which students are given the opportunity to share their religious identities with one another, which could reduce their anticipated and perceived stigma.

Preparing for exams in introductory biology classrooms is a complex metacognitive task. Focusing on lower achieving students (those with entering ACT scores below the median at our institution), we compared the effect of two different assignments distributed ahead of exams by dividing classes in half to receive either terms to define or open-ended metacognitive questions. Completing metacognitive assignments resulted in moderately higher exam scores for students on the second and third exams. Metacognitive assignments also improved accuracy (difference between predicted and actual exam scores) for the second and third exam in lower ACT students, but that improvement was driven largely by higher exam scores in the metacognitive group. Thus, despite the fact that the metacognitive assignments specifically asked students to reflect on their previous exam performance, their previous estimates and predict how well they expected to perform on the exam they were preparing for, there was little evidence that these assignments influenced lower achieving students' confidence levels any more than assignments where students defined terms. While understanding relevant terms was certainly important in this course, these results highlight that open-ended metacognitive prompts may improve exam scores in some students in introductory biology classrooms.

Genetic variation is historically challenging for undergraduate students to master, potentially due to its grounding in both evolution and genetics. Traditionally, student expertise in genetic variation has been evaluated using Key Concepts. However, Cognitive Construals may add to a more nuanced picture of students' developing expertise. Here, we analyze the occurrence of Key Concepts and Cognitive Construals among three types of student representations: interviews, drawn models, and constructed responses (CRs). Our mixed-methods analysis indicates that differential survival and differential reproduction occur more often in interviews than in CRs. In our interviews, presence of Cognitive Construals indicate varying levels of understanding of genetic variation, but we were not able to detect Cognitive Construals in students' models or CRs. Finally, our analyses of both Key Concepts and Cognitive Construals in student representations indicate that Cognitive Construals can co-occur with any number of Key Concepts, and that the presence of Construal-based language alone does not seem to correlate to the expert nature of a response. Taken together, our results highlight the need for instructors to avoid treating Construal-based language as implicit disconnects in student understanding, and to use multiple methods to gain a holistic picture of student expertise.

Students struggle to regulate their learning during independent study sessions. In this study, we ask whether an online behavioral intervention helped introductory students decrease distraction while studying. The intervention consisted of exam 1 reflection, exam 2 planning, and exam 2 reflection exercises. During planning, students formed a goal, mentally contrasted (MC) a positive outcome of their goal to their present reality, identified an obstacle, and formed an implementation intention (II) to overcome that obstacle. During reflection, students self-reported their distraction while studying. Distraction was the most frequently reported study obstacle, and decreasing distraction was the second most frequently reported study goal. While students who aimed to decrease distraction as a goal did not follow through, students who planned for distraction obstacles did follow through on decreasing distraction levels. Only about half of students generated an II that aligned with their study goal, which may provide one reason for the opposing follow-through of distraction framed as a goal versus as an obstacle. Lastly, we examined the specificity of students' II's and found no relationship with follow-through. Overall, MC with II holds promise as a self-regulatory technique to help introductory biology students change their behaviors while studying.

Researchers who study student acceptance of evolution rely on surveys that are designed to measure evolution acceptance. It is important for these surveys to measure evolution acceptance accurately and in isolation from other constructs, so that researchers can accurately determine what leads to low acceptance. The Inventory of Student Evolution Acceptance (I-SEA) and the Generalized Acceptance of EvolutioN Evaluation (GAENE) are two surveys that were developed to improve upon the limitations of earlier surveys. Yet neither survey has been extensively tested for response process validity, which can assess the extent to which students use constructs other than their acceptance of evolution to answer survey items. In this study, we examined the response-process validity of the I-SEA and GAENE by conducting cognitive interviews with 60 undergraduate students. Interviews revealed that both surveys retain certain response-process issues. The I-SEA conflated knowledge about and acceptance of evolution for a subset of students. The GAENE measured evolution acceptance inconsistently because students interpreted "evolution" in different ways; it also measured willingness to advocate for evolution in addition to acceptance. Researchers can use these findings to better inform their survey choice when designing future studies, and to further improve the measurement of evolution acceptance.

Evolution is foundational to understanding biology, yet learners at all stages have incomplete and incorrect ideas that persist beyond graduation. Contextual features of prompts (e.g., taxon of organism, acquisition vs. loss of traits, etc.) have been shown to influence both the learning process and the ideas students express in explanations of evolutionary processes. In this study, we compare students' explanations of natural selection for humans versus a nonhuman animal (cheetah) at different times during biology instruction. We found "taxon" to be a significant predictor of the content of students' explanations. Responses to "cheetah" prompts contained a larger number and diversity of key concepts (e.g., variation, heritability, differential reproduction) and fewer naïve ideas (e.g., need, adapt) when compared with responses to an isomorphic prompt containing "human" as the organism. Overall, instruction increased the prevalence of key concepts, reduced naïve ideas, and caused a modest reduction in differences due to taxon. Our findings suggest that the students are reasoning differently about evolutionary processes in humans as compared with nonhuman animals, and that targeted instruction may both increase students' facility with key concepts while reducing their susceptibility to contextual influences.

Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) offer an expanding avenue to engage students in real-world scientific practices. Increasingly, CUREs are instructed by graduate teaching assistants (TAs), yet TAs may be underprepared to facilitate and face unique barriers when teaching CUREs. Consequently, unless TAs are provided professional development (PD) and resources to teach CUREs effectively, they and their students may not reap the assumed benefits of CURE instruction. Here, we describe three perspectives - that of the CURE TA, the CURE designer/facilitator, and the CURE student - that are collectively intended to inform the development of tentative components of CURE TA PD. We compare these perspectives to previous studies in the literature in an effort to identify commonalities across all sources and offer potential insights for advancing CURE TA PD efforts across a diversity of institutional environments. We propose that the most effective CURE TA PD programs will promote the use of CURE-specific instructional strategies as benchmarks for guiding change in teaching practices and should focus on three major elements: 1) enhancement of research and teaching acumen, 2) development of effective and inclusive mentoring practices, and 3) identification and understanding of the factors that make CUREs a unique learning experience.

Effective communication about science is a core skill undergraduates should learn, but little research has explored how students communicate about culturally controversial science topics. In this study, we explored how Black undergraduate science students took on the role of science communicators in their communities during the COVID-19 pandemic. We interviewed 23 Black students about their experiences learning about COVID-19 vaccines and communicating about COVID-19 vaccines to their communities. We found that students' racial/ethnic and science backgrounds made them feel a responsibility to be effective communicators about COVID-19 vaccines as potential trusted messengers within their communities. However, students were using limited strategies when communicating and were unsure how to communicate about COVID-19 topics effectively to those who were vaccine-hesitant or doubted the severity of the pandemic. Finally, students described ways that their biology instructors could have helped them be more confident when communicating about COVID-19 vaccines with their communities. Findings suggest that biology instructors could teach science communication principles in addition to content knowledge about culturally controversial science topics in their undergraduate classes to build on students' developing science communication skills.