Presenters: Preston Carroll, Utah Valley University, Biology
Authors: Preston Carroll, MacKenzie Norman, Joshua Premo, Brittney N. Wyatt
Faculty Advisors: Dr. Britt Wyatt, Utah Valley University, Biology
Institution: Utah Valley University
Students who are able to recognize themselves in science tend to be more successful in their STEM courses and are more likely to pursue a STEM career. This “recognition” of oneself as a science person or scientist is an important foundation to one’s science identity (Carlone and Johnson). To explore how students recognize and describe their science identity, our research aimed to create a tool that uses image/phrase and identity associations to evaluate undergraduate student conceptions of science identities. This process could be used to evaluate how undergraduate students describe a presented element of science culture as being related to either scientists, science persons or science learners. This tool utilizes different images or phrases associated with the field of science and students are prompted to select which science identifier (scientist, science person or science learner) they find to be most applicable. For example, students are shown an image of a lab coat and asked to attribute this image to one of the three previously mentioned identifiers. This tool will be distributed in a survey format to the following undergraduate biology student demographics: non-major, introductory-level major and advanced-level major courses. Analysis will examine how students’ perceptions change as they advance through higher level science courses. We predict that students will be more variable in how they categorize images as students become more involved in research and participate in more laboratory procedures and advanced to higher level science classes. By understanding how students attribute certain images to various components of science identity, this tool has the potential to identify ways that instructors can engage students and reduce stereotypes that may be preventing more students from connecting to the field of science.