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Recently, it has been argued that improving students' genomics literacy could prevent students from developing erroneous beliefs about social identity, such as the belief that racial groups differ cognitively and behaviorally because of their genes; a belief called genetic essentialism. To date, however, little research has explored if or how a conceptual understanding of genomics protects against the development of genetic essentialism. Using a randomized control trial (RCT) (N = 721, 9th-12th graders), we explore if students with more genomics literacy are more able to conceptually change their genetic essentialist beliefs after engaging in a learning experience designed to refute essentialist thinking. The results of the RCT demonstrated that students with higher genomics literacy (relative to those with lower genomics literacy) exhibited greater reductions in the perception of racial differences and greater reductions in belief in genetic essentialism after learning how patterns of human genetic variation refute genetic essentialism. These results suggest that genetics education can protect students from developing a belief in genetic essentialism when it provides them with opportunities to learn multifactorial genetics and population thinking in conjunction with how these concepts refute essentialist thinking.

Conflation of sex and gender is implicated in the development of essentialist thinking, which has been linked to the justification of systems of prejudice in modern society. This exploratory study presents findings from a person randomized control trial conducted with 460 students in 8th-10th grade that investigated the extent to which students conflate sex and gender in their writing about genetics. Students were randomly assigned to one of three short readings that either (1) explained the genetics of sex in plants; (2) explained the genetics of sex in humans; or (3) refuted neuro-genetic essentialism, offering instead a social explanation for why women receive fewer PhDs in science, technology, mathematics, and engineering than men. While previous findings from the authors suggest links between the condition students were assigned to and psychological indicators related to essentialist thinking, no work was done to investigate how students' use of language might implicate cognitive conflation as a possible factor in understanding these results. In this study, student responses to a constructed response writing task given after the reading were analyzed to investigate the use of sex and gender language. Students in all three conditions used both sex and gender language. However, students in the refutational text condition tended to use sex and gender language deliberately in order to explain PhD attainment, while students in the traditional genetics conditions used the terms interchangeably, suggesting subconscious conflation. Students in the genetics of human sex condition were more likely to manifest this conflation than students in the genetics of plant sex condition. Implications for instruction are discussed.

Genetic essentialism of race is the belief that racial groups have different underlying genetic essences which cause them to differ physically, cognitively, or behaviorally. Apparently, no published studies have explored if belief in genetic essentialism of race among adolescents differs after many weeks of formal instruction about different domains of genetics knowledge. Nor have any studies explored if such differences reflect a coherent change in students' racial beliefs. We use a quasi-experimental design (N = 254 students in 7th-12th grade) to explore these gaps. Over the course of 3 months, we compared students who learned from a curriculum on multifactorial inheritance and genetic ancestry to students who learned from their business as usual (BAU) genetics curriculum that discussed Mendelian and molecular genetics without any reference to race, multifactorial genetics, or genetic ancestry. Relative to the BAU condition, classrooms that learned from the multifactorial genetics and ancestry curriculum grew significantly more in their knowledge of multifactorial genetics and decreased significantly more in their genetic essentialist perceptions, attributions, and beliefs. From a conceptual change perspective, these findings suggest that classrooms using a curriculum emphasizing genetic complexity are more likely to shift toward a coherent anti-essentialist understanding of racial difference.

When people are exposed to information that leads them to overestimate the actual amount of genetic difference between racial groups, it can augment their racial biases. However, there is apparently no research that explores if the reverse is possible. Does teaching adolescents scientifically accurate information about genetic variation within and between US census races reduce their racial biases? We randomized 8th and 9th grade students (n = 166) into separate classrooms to learn for an entire week either about the topics of (a) human genetic variation or (b) climate variation. In a cross-over randomized trial with clustering, we demonstrate that when students learn about genetic variation within and between racial groups it significantly changes their perceptions of human genetic variation, thereby causing a significant decrease in their scores on instruments assessing cognitive forms of prejudice. We then replicate these findings in two computer-based randomized controlled trials, one with adults (n = 176) and another with biology students (n = 721, 9th-12th graders). These results indicate that teaching about human variation in the domain of genetics has potentially powerful effects on social cognition during adolescence. In turn, we argue that learning about the social and quantitative complexities of human genetic variation research could prepare students to become informed participants in a society where human genetics is invoked as a rationale in sociopolitical debates.

For over a century, genetic arguments for the existence of racial inequality have been used to oppose policies that promote social equality. And, over that same time period, American biology textbooks have repeatedly discussed genetic differences between races. This experiment tests whether racial terminology in the biology curriculum causes adolescents to develop genetic beliefs about racial difference, thereby affecting prejudice. Individual students (N = 135, grades 7-9) were randomly assigned within their classrooms to learn either from: (i) four text-based lessons discussing racial differences in skeletal structure and the prevalence of genetic disease (racial condition); or (ii) an identical curriculum lacking racial terminology (nonracial condition). Over 3-months that coincided with this learning, students in the racial condition grew significantly more in their perception of the amount of genetic variation between races relative to students in the nonracial condition. Furthermore, those in the racial condition grew in their belief that races differ in intelligence for genetic reasons significantly more than those in the nonracial condition. And, compared to the nonracial condition, students in the racial condition became significantly less interested in socializing across racial lines and less supportive of policies that reduce racial inequality in education. These findings show how biology education sustains racial inequality, and conversely, how human genetic variation education could be designed to reduce genetically based racism.

The article offers information on the development of essentialist views about sex and gender and how high school biology textbooks may influence these views. Topics include the essentialist assumptions about sex and gender; the interaction between conceptual biases and sociocultural input in the development of essentialism; and the need for biology textbooks to accurately reflect scientific knowledge about sex and gender.

Argumentation is fundamental to science education, both as a prominent feature of scientific reasoning and as an effective mode of learning—a perspective reflected in contemporary frameworks and standards. The successful implementation of argumentation in school science, however, requires a paradigm shift in science assessment from the measurement of knowledge and understanding to the measurement of performance and knowledge in use. Performance tasks requiring argumentation must capture the many ways students can construct and evaluate arguments in science, yet such tasks are both expensive and resource‐intensive to score. In this study we explore how machine learning text classification techniques can be applied to develop efficient, valid, and accurate constructed‐response measures of students' competency with written scientific argumentation that are aligned with a validated argumentation learning progression. Data come from 933 middle school students in the San Francisco Bay Area and are based on three sets of argumentation items in three different science contexts. The findings demonstrate that we have been able to develop computer scoring models that can achieve substantial to almost perfect agreement between human‐assigned and computer‐predicted scores. Model performance was slightly weaker for harder items targeting higher levels of the learning progression, largely due to the linguistic complexity of these responses and the sparsity of higher‐level responses in the training data set. Comparing the efficacy of different scoring approaches revealed that breaking down students' arguments into multiple components (e.g., the presence of an accurate claim or providing sufficient evidence), developing computer models for each component, and combining scores from these analytic components into a holistic score produced better results than holistic scoring approaches. However, this analytical approach was found to be differentially biased when scoring responses from English learners (EL) students as compared to responses from non‐EL students on some items. Differences in the severity between human and computer scores for EL between these approaches are explored, and potential sources of bias in automated scoring are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This field experiment manipulated the racial framing of a reading on human genetic disease to explore whether racial terminology in the biology curriculum affects how adolescents explain and respond to the racial achievement gap in American education. Carried out in a public high school in the San Francisco Bay Area, students recruited for the study (N = 86) were randomly assigned to read either a racially framed or a nonracially framed textbook passage on genetic diseases as part of a unit on Mendelian genetics. Afterwards, they responded to two instruments measuring belief in the biological/genetic basis of race and one measure that recorded their explanations of the racial achievement gap and their willingness to volunteer their free time to fix it. Results demonstrated that students in the racially framed condition exhibited significantly greater agreement in the genetic basis of racial difference than students in the nonracially framed condition. A content analysis of students' explanations of the achievement gap also demonstrated that a significantly greater proportion of students gave genetic explanations of the achievement gap in the racially framed condition compared to the other condition. Furthermore, students' prior beliefs about race interacted with the reading treatments to affect students' willingness to fix the racial achievement gap.

Even though human racial difference has been a longstanding topic of the school biology curriculum, there is little evidence that contemporary biology textbooks challenge stereotypical racial beliefs that are based in biological thinking. Rather, the modern biology curriculum may be a place where such beliefs about race are perpetuated unwittingly. Drawing upon a theoretical framework of racial conceptualization based in psychological essentialism, this paper argues that biology textbook curricula ought to directly challenge problematic and unscientific racial beliefs to increase understanding of human genetic variation and decrease racial beliefs associated with prejudice.

Race has been a longstanding topic in the biology textbook curriculum. Yet, there appears to be no research investigating whether the treatment of race in modern biology textbooks impacts how students conceptualize race. In the present study, a double-blind field experiment employing mixed-methods is used to investigate the impact of textbook-based genetics learning on essentialist conceptions of race amongst adolescents. The study was carried out in an eighth grade classroom in a California Bay Area School. Students recruited for the study (N = 43) read either a racialized or a non-racialized textbook passage on human genetic diseases and completed a reading comprehension assessment. After a short distracting task they responded to items in two different race conception instruments. Controlling for race, gender, age, prior race-conceptions, and reading comprehension, statistically significant effects were observed on both race conception instruments by treatment. Students in the racialized condition exhibited stronger essentialist conceptions of race than students in the non-racialized condition. Additionally, an exploratory analysis indicated that an understanding of Mendelian heredity moderated the observed treatment effects. The findings of the present study tentatively suggest that textbook-based instruction in school biology can inadvertently reinforce essentialist conceptions of race that underlie racial bias. Implications for teaching and research are discussed.

Genetic concepts are regularly used in arguments about racial inequality. This review summarizes research about the relationship between genetics education and a particular form of racial prejudice known as genetic essentialism. Genetic essentialism is a cognitive form of prejudice that is used to rationalize inequality. Studies suggest that belief in genetic essentialism among genetics students can be increased or decreased based on what students learn about human genetics and why they learn it. Research suggests that genetics education does little to prevent the development of genetic essentialism, and it may even exacerbate belief in it. However, some forms of genetics education can avert this problem. In particular, if instructors teach genetics to help students understand the flaws in genetic essentialist arguments, then it is possible to reduce belief in genetic essentialism among biology students. This review outlines our knowledge about how to accomplish this goal and the research that needs to be done to end genetic essentialism through genetics education., Competing Interests: The author declares no competing interests., (© 2021 The Author(s).)