Surviving weed- out classes may be a state of mind
“Look to your left; look to your right. One of you won’t be here in the next semester.”
It’s a typical lecture delivered at the start of a semester in the sciences, and one that Ainissa Ramirez remembered hearing early during her undergraduate studies at Brown University.
Now a successful materials scientist and science writer, Ramirez recalls that she was almost pushed out of pursuing a career in science because of her weed- out classes. As their name suggests, the classes are common especially in the sciences and mathematics at U. S. universities, and are designed to demarcate students who are likely to do well in a given subject from those who are not.
Those who excel in these introductory classes can proceed with completing a major on the topic if they wish. But there’s evidence that weed- out classes disproportionately hinder underrepresented groups, including women, as well as Black, Native American and Hispanic people, from pursuing science, technology, engineering and math degrees.
“Everyone should have some science in their life,” Ramirez said, adding that classes should be tailored toward different students’ needs rather than constantly trying to eliminate them.
“Your life’s path is decided for you based on this weed- out class,” she said. “That’s the problem that I have.”
A study published this month in the journal Science Advances adds to evidence that whether students can endure weed- out classes has less to do with innate ability and more to do with their frame of mind and social connections with their classmates when starting a rigorous new course of study. In an experiment involving 226 biology undergraduate students taking an introductory biology class at Columbia University, the researchers found that a simple psychological exercise improved the chances of all students taking a second semester class, regardless of race or gender. The study highlights how a variety of interventions may help more students stay in the pipeline to become future scientists, engineers and mathematicians.
The study authors asked about half the students to complete a short exercise in the third week of the semester before their first test in which they ranked family, friends, independence, religion, creativity and other aspects of their lives in order of importance. They then wrote an essay on the most important things in their lives for 15 minutes. This is called a values affirmation exercise, and the idea behind it was to make students more comfortable when it came to interacting and engaging with their classmates. Several previous studies have shown that conducting such a task can help produce positive social attitudes, outcomes and behavior.
The remaining students, who served as a control group, also listed values in order of importance and wrote an essay about the things they considered least important, explaining what might be of importance to someone else.
What the authors found was that the group of students who completed the affirmation task made on average 29% more friends in the course by its end than those who didn’t complete the task. They were also nearly 12% more likely to take the next biology class the following semester.
“This exercise is really a way to broaden people’s focus in a stressful moment when they might otherwise be very narrowly focused on the test,” said Kate Turetsky, a coauthor of the study who is a social psychologist at Princeton University.
Turetsky acknowledged that the ways affirmation techniques are used needed further study and that they may not be sufficient to retain more students in STEM education. But the outcomes for students in her experiment hinted at one truth of weed- out classes and how science education can be structured.