Research
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 work on transforming this knowledge into practical classroom interventions that can improve academic outcomes and well-being by reducing negative stressors so that all students can grow through their college education.
To achieve these goals, we ask a variety of questions.
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. 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).
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 and why does that matter?
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 do instructors communicate their beliefs?
Instructors communicate their mindset beliefs in a number of ways (e.g., syllabus, emails, and one-on-one interactions with students). These messages communicate what (e.g., flawless, top performance vs. learning and development) and who (those who are “innately smart” or “gifted” vs. those who are “hard working or improving”) are valued in the classroom.
Our team is exploring how messages that instructors communicate to students about their abilities influence students' experiences and academic outcomes. We interviewed students to understand how instructors communicate their expectations to their students and create a classroom culture. Through this work we are pinpointing the ways instructors can most effectively communicate positive messages to their students, and how these messages could and should be adapted to meet the context and needs of each population.
How can we use this to improve undergraduate biology education?
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 implement 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!
