Collaborative Research: Exploring How Undergraduate Learning of Multifactorial Genetics Affects Belief in Genetic Determinism

With support from the NSF Improving Undergraduate STEM Education Program, this project aims to serve the national interest in high quality STEM teaching by examining how to teach genetics to undergraduate students in a more socially responsible manner. Genes are important for determining the characteristics and features of living things, including humans.

For example, genes are important in a person's physical appearance, regulating things such as height, eye color, and skin tone. Genes are also important in characteristics such as susceptibility to particular diseases. However, such characteristics are not simply caused by a single gene working alone.

Instead, almost all characteristics result from the effects of many genes working together and with conditions in the person's environment. Since many elements may influence such characteristics, scientists describe them as multifactorial traits, or multifactorial genetics. Genetic determinism is the idea that human actions and traits are caused primarily or exclusively by genes and are little influenced by anything else.

Although the science of genetics long ago repudiated genetic determinism, belief in it is socially widespread and educationally problematic due to its relationship with racial and gender disparities in STEM education. Overestimation of the role that genes play in shaping complex human traits leads to an underestimation of a person’s abilities to change because the genetic basis of such abilities is believed to make them immutable.

When undergraduates develop the belief that personality is unchangeable they can become less willing to confront individuals who stereotype others because of their race or gender. When individuals from underrepresented groups take undergraduate courses in STEM fields where they themselves or those around them believe that academic ability is inherited, it can decrease their grades in those courses and their motivations to pursue further education in those fields.

Recent research in genetics education suggests that the genetics curriculum influences student belief in genetic determinism. Understanding how belief in genetic determinism changes in response to the content undergraduates learn in their genetics courses could therefore help educators understand how to design a better genetics education— one that helps students understand genetic inheritance without increasing gene-determinist beliefs.

This project will develop several undergraduate genetics education interventions that teach students about a variety of genetics concepts. These interventions will be tested through experiments in multiple undergraduate courses to understand how they influence belief in genetic determinism, beliefs about the malleability of human traits, and motivations to study STEM and to confront prejudice.

By comparing the results of the experiments with qualitative studies that explore how undergraduates reason with the intervention materials, this project will develop new knowledge about how belief in genetic determism develops during genetics education and how the genetics curriculum can be redesigned to reduce the prevalence of this belief.

This project will conduct three large-scale randomized control trials (RCTs) with undergraduates at multiple institutions to explore the social-cognitive effects of learning about specific genomics concepts. These RCTs will be supplemented with cognitive think-aloud interviews that will explore the domain-specific knowledge and experiences that undergraduates use to make sense of genomics concepts.

The study hopes to address to what extent multifactorial genetics education affects undergraduate beliefs in genetic determinism, implicit person theories, and the motivation to study science. The study also hopes to identify which multifactorial concepts produce the largest effect on these variables and which factors mediate the relationship between multifactorial genetics education and belief in genetic determinism.

Additional studies hope to address the significance, reproducibility, and robustness of the results. The mixed-methods approach intends to advance understanding of the social-cognitive mechanisms linking the content of the genetics curriculum to belief in genetic determinsm and the extent to which genetics education influences undergraduates’ STEM-related motivations through its impacts on their social cognition.

This knowledge may help college biology faculty understand how their genetics curriculum affects interest in STEM fields among underrepresented groups. THE NSF Improving Undergraduate STEM Education Program supports project to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.