Research experience in a faculty-led laboratory provides a unique context where students learn about the culture of science. What we don’t yet know is how faculty communicate that culture of science in ways that do – or do not – reproduce cultural barriers for historically underrepresented and/or racially marginalized students.

Our findings have led us to identify several important institutional practices and policies that can promote equity and inclusion in research labs.

We developed and tested a theoretical model for understanding resistance to and support for diversity-enhancing interventions in undergraduate biology classrooms. Findings illustrate the trade-offs between value and cost, as well as the importance of social cues (i.e., looking to peers or institutional leaders), for shaping faculty decisions to implement (or not) a proven classroom intervention activity, the utility value intervention. These findings led us to identify several important institutional practices and policies that can promote intervention adoption.

This project examined whether students, in general, and especially students from historically underrepresented and/or racially marginalized backgrounds, are more likely to persist through the foundational levels of undergraduate science education when they see connections between what they are learning and their personally and/or culturally relevant values. We investigated the roles of value perception for science motivation and persistence using both a longitudinal survey study and a randomized controlled trial classroom intervention study.

Led by colleagues at the University of Wisconsin, PULSE is a multi-institutional collaborative study of the utility value intervention (UVI) in foundational college biology and chemistry classes. Building on previously successful results in biology, we aim to test the UVI effectiveness at scale in chemistry courses. We also test whether newer versions of the UVI that emphasize communal and prosocial connections to course content are more effective at promoting motivation and performance for students who are historically underrepresented in STEM.