The ESA’s 4DEE framework integrates concepts, skills, cross-cutting themes, and human dimensions as learning objectives for curricula. This approach, along with active learning practices and appropriate assessment, may broaden the success of underrepresented students in biology. However, curricula are just one part of inclusive practice. The quality of instructor implementation is a key element in classroom climate and student success. Research in Communication Studies, Psychology, and Biology Education provides evidence that nonverbal and verbal communication, and how students perceive instructor practices have profound impacts on student emotion and their sense of belonging in science. Given this, we have asked two questions at our institution: 1) Is emotion related to student success, and 2) Do individual instructors differentially impact student emotion? This research has been conducted over two years through student surveys in introductory biology courses. Students were asked about their anxiety, their perceived course difficulty, their perception of their instructor’s nonverbal communication, their perception of their instructor’s support of students, their self-compassion, and their intent to persist in the major. Permission to acquire their course grades from their instructor was obtained. Ordinal and logistic regression identified factors that explained the most variance in student success and student emotion.
Results/Conclusions
Anxiety is differentially experienced by students in introductory biology. In particular, women and students who took fewer high school AP courses had higher anxieties than other students. Students with higher anxiety indicated they were less likely to persist in the major, and anxiety differentially impacted certain student demographic groups. Student anxiety also differed depending on the class students were enrolled in. Student anxiety from early to late in the semester increased, decreased, or stayed the same, on average, depending on the class. Almost 50% of the anxiety in most classes was explained by just a few factors, with perception of course difficulty a factor in every class. For some classes, the perception of the instructor’s nonverbal communication abilities decreased student anxiety. In others, it was the instructor’s support of student autonomy (a measure of the quality of the learning climate) that mattered most. These results indicate that to build an inclusive classroom climate, instructors need to attend to both curriculum and the nature of their implementation. Ironically, planning for implementation is often not a part of curricular frameworks; we will suggest factors that instructors can consider as they plan for inclusive 4DEE implementation.