Student Perceptions on the Value of an Ideologically Aware Curriculum

Abstract

Recent efforts to make undergraduate biology more inclusive include developing content that explores how human values and priorities impact science, and previous work documents how instructors value an "ideologically aware" biology curriculum that highlights these themes. Here, we surveyed a national sample of undergraduate students in biology classes to explore student perceptions of Ideological Awareness via a mixed-methods investigation. Through quantitative analyses, we found that women students, transgender or gender nonconforming students, and students majoring in biology or another science field were more likely to support the inclusion of Ideological Awareness in the biology classroom. We used expectancy value theory to guide our qualitative interpretations of student survey responses. Specifically, students' expectancy of success and the intrinsic value they attach to ideologically aware content influenced their overall acceptance and advocacy for its integration into the curriculum. Students reported valuing Ideological Awareness because it can increase awareness and decrease biases. The most frequently cited cost was the potential for Ideological Awareness to elicit negative emotions. We compared results with similar or identical questions on a national survey distributed to biology instructors, which showed general alignment between students and instructors. These results support the incorporation of Ideological Awareness in biology education, emphasizing the need for more research on the implementation of inclusive content to address potential challenges.

FIGURE 1.

(A) Perceived importance of Ideological Awareness curricular inclusion by gender. Men rated the importance of Ideological Awareness in biology as the lowest, followed by women, and our combined TGNC category rated the importance of Ideological Awareness in biology as higher than the other two gender categories. (B) Perceived importance of Ideological Awareness curricular inclusion by major. Those who had a declared major in a non-science field rated the importance of Ideological Awareness in biology as the lowest, while both biology majors and non-biology science majors rated the importance of Ideological Awareness in biology similarly. These raincloud plots show, from top to bottom for each category, a smoothed frequency distribution of the data, a boxplot of the data, and the individual data points, with jitter applied. Significance of pairwise comparisons is shown via the rightmost bars with the following code: **p < 0.01; ***p < 0.001; n.s., not significant.

FIGURE 2.

Biology student (light-green bars) and instructor (dark-green lines) responses to the prompt, “What would be the possible benefits of incorporating more ideologically aware resources into the biology content you are learning?” Instructor responses, which we include for the percentage and magnitude mismatch comparison, were reported by Beatty et al., (2023).

FIGURE 3.

Biology student (light-green bars) responses to the prompt, “What are the possible downsides of incorporating more ideologically aware material into the biology content you are learning?” Inset includes subcodes of negative emotions described by students.