Promoting Motivation for Underrepresented Groups in Undergraduate Biology and Chemistry Courses

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Promoting Motivation for Underrepresented Groups in Undergraduate Biology and Chemistry Courses ABSTRACT Our goal is to broaden the participation of at risk-students in biomedical fields with interventions in gateway biology and chemistry classes. Using a theoretically-grounded utility-value intervention, we aim to close achievement gaps for first-generation (FG) students, those for whom neither parent obtained a 4-year college degree, and for underrepresented minority (URM) students. Lessons learned from our previously funded large-scale double-blind randomized field experiment in introductory biology courses at the University of Wisconsin- Madison (UW) demonstrated that the utility value intervention (UVI), in which students write about the personal relevance of course material, was successful in reducing the achievement gap for URM students by 40%, relative to a control condition in which students summarized course content. This effect was even larger for FG-URM students: the gap was reduced by 61%. We build upon these findings by proposing research to (1) determine whether the UVI effects documented at Wisconsin can be replicated in different types of institutions and courses, and whether the UVI can be adapted for a more diverse student sample and (2) systematically understand and refine the nature of the UVI by continuing to test the underlying motivational theory and mechanisms. To accomplish our goals, our research team at UW will first conduct a series of laboratory experiments designed to optimize materials and implementation features of the UVI to create new versions of the UVI that emphasize communal themes. We know from our previous work that the UVI was most effective for students who were motivated to help others, and for FG and URM students who wrote about communal themes in their essays. This raises new questions about whether communal writing is integral to the effectiveness of the UVI for FG-URM students and whether we might see even stronger UVI effects for FG and URM students if they are specifically encouraged to reflect on communal themes. We have developed an experimental design to address these critical questions using multi-institutional field experiments that provide tests of replication and scale-up potential in biology classes and extension to chemistry classes, and identify the optimal approach for the greatest impact of the UVI. We test the new communal-UVI against the original personal-UVI and control writing assignments with nearly 5,000 students across 6 academic semesters of biology and chemistry in two uniquely diverse institutions: San Diego State University and Montana State University, which serve a significant number of FG students and enroll large populations of Latino and Native American students, respectively.