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Why are some STEM students resilient and persist whereas others drop out?
Why are some STEM students resilient and persist whereas others drop out?
Some students who equal their peers in knowledge, skills, and abilities leave science for reasons unrelated to their competence or potential as scientists. In order to prepare a diverse and talented scientific workforce, it is critical to understand the social and psychological factors that motivate students’ decisions to leave or persist in STEM career pathways. In the Limeri Lab, we investigate the impacts of social-psychological factors on undergraduates’ performance and retention in STEM. We explore how students’ beliefs about themselves, their abilities, and the nature of science affects their psychological experiences and academic success. We also investigate what instructors believe about students' abilities, how these instructor beliefs influence students' experiences and outcomes, and how instructors can intentionally and strategically create a positive and supportive classroom climate. We aim to transform the knowledge we gain through our research into practical classroom interventions and recommendations to improve academic outcomes.
To achieve these goals, we ask a variety of questions.
What do students believe about their abilities?
What do students believe about their abilities?
Students’ beliefs about their abilities form a meaning system that influences the types of goals they set, how they attribute, interpret, and respond to struggles, and whether they seek or avoid challenging tasks and learning opportunities. We study three beliefs, called "Lay Theories"
Growth Mindset: Can intellectual abilities improve? Students who believe that they can improve their intelligence through hard work, seeking help, and applying the right strategies (growth mindset) cope better with challenges and have better outcomes than students who believe that intelligence is an uncontrollable, stable trait (fixed mindset).
Universality Belief: Who has potential to be extremely intelligent? Students who believe that everyone has the same level of potential (universal belief) are more interested in pursuing STEM, prioritize learning over grades, and are less concerned about being judged in class. Students who believe that some people have more or less potential than others (non-universal belief) may be more concerned about their ability to do well in STEM fields and are more prone to engage in destructive, self-protective behaviors.
Brilliance Belief: What does it take to be successful? When people think that you have to be "brilliant" to be successful in a particular field, groups socially stereotyped to not be brilliant (e.g., women and people of color) are underrepresented in those fields. When students believe brilliance is required, they are more anxious about being judged for their abilities in their classes.
How do we know what students believe?
How do we know what students believe?
All kinds of science involve using instruments to collect data. In many biology labs, these are pieces of lab equipment. For example, pictured on the right is PI Limeri using a spectrophotometer to measure light transmittance through different types of fabric for creating butterfly enclosures. When we study things in peoples' heads that we cannot directly observe (e.g., their beliefs, values, knowledge, and skills), we use surveys as our instruments. In both cases, it's important that we have the data to be confident that the numbers we get from our instruments are faithful and reliable representations of what we are trying to measure.
The branch of research dealing with how we know that survey responses tell us what we wanted to know about a participants is called psychometrics. Much of our lab's research deals with psychometrics, because data quality is the most foundational part of any strong research program.
PI Limeri developed a new survey to measure what students beleive about their abilities, called the Undergraduate Lay Theories of Abilities (ULTrA) Survey. See more information about this on the ULTrA Survey tab.
An image of two types of data collection instruments that PI Limeri has used: a spectrophotometer and a survey.
What do instructors believe about their students' abilities?
What do instructors believe about their students' abilities?
Recent research has shown that instructors' beliefs about their students' abilities influence students' experiences and outcomes. However, we don't yet know the mechanism of why instructors' beliefs matter. We are investigating multiple hypothesized mechanisms that could explain how instructors beliefs influence students' experiences in the classroom and their academic outcomes. We are surveying instructors and analyzing their syllabi to understand how instructors' beliefs and expectations about their students may relate to their course policies and pedagogical decisions. We are also investigating how these two factors influence students' experiences in the classroom and their academic outcomes to uncover this mechanism.
How can instructors communicate positive and supportive messages?
How can instructors communicate positive and supportive messages?
There is growing evidence that students and instructors are not on the same page. We asked instructors about their beliefs and their students what they perceive their instructor to believe, and there was no correlation!
Clearly, we need effective strategies to clearly communicate positive beliefs to students to create positive classroom climates that foster student growth and resilience. We are exploring how students perceive their instructors' beliefs. We aim to find out what kinds of things instructors say and do influence student perceptions, so we can generate evidence-based recommendations for instructors to build supportive classroom cultures.
How can we apply our findings to improve undergraduate biology education?
How can we apply our findings to improve undergraduate biology education?
The BEE Project
The BEE Project
The Biology Education Enhancement (BEE) Project is an NSF-funded collaboration with Dr. Elizabeth Canning, a social psychologist at Washington State University, to apply the ideas described above to improving outcomes from undergraduate introductory biology classes. We are working with instructors at four institutions to test two types of mindset interventions in introductory biology.
In the "student intervention," students learn about how the brain's structure changes during learning.
In the "instructor intervention," students hear messages from their instructor that support a growth mindset culture.
We randomly assign students to an intervention or control condition for both interventions, which will allow us to look for interactions: are the student mindset interventions more effective when the instructor creates a mindset-supportive environment? These results could help us understand how to best support students. We are currently implementing the interventions and cannot wait to see the results!
How do students benefit from doing research in their courses?
How do students benefit from doing research in their courses?
The Limeri lab always has an active team of undergraduates working on these projects. However, we only have so much capacity to mentor students one-on-one. Incorporating research projects into coursework, called Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences, is a powerful tool to scale up research experiences to more students.
Leveraging digitized Natural History Collections data for course-based undergraduate research experiences
Leveraging digitized Natural History Collections data for course-based undergraduate research experiences
Biological Collections in Ecology and Evolution Network (BCEENET) is a community of undergraduate educators, natural history curators, education experts, and data experts who support the development and implementation of Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences in ecology and evolution, using data from digitized natural history collections, like natural history museum collections and herbaria. The community has developed 4 open-access curricula that have been taught at over 40 institutions to over 5,000 students.
Our research is exploring how students benefit from these courses. In particular, we want to know (1) whether students gain the same types of benefits from BCEENET courses as they do from research experiences that are more traditional lab experiences with pipettes and data collection; and (2) whether students gain unique types of benefits from these research experiences focused on data analysis that students may not gain from other types of courses or research experiences.
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