Recorded on May 29, 2020 as part of the Online Mini-Symposium on Connecting Research and Teaching sponsored by the Graduate School's Future Faculty and Academic Careers office, involving Cornell graduate student and alumni presentations on
Teaching as Research projects they conducted.
Conference webpagePresenter: Arielle Johnson, PhD Student, Plant Biology
Title: Perceptions of Scientific Professionals in an Introductory Cell Biology Course
Research Area or Question: Does talking explicitly about "struggle stories" in research decrease imposter syndrome and increase students' identification with scientists and scientific career outcomes?
Course: BIOMG 1350: Cell and Developmental Biology
Many students, especially gender and racial minorities, switch majors from STEM to the humanities after early biology coursework. This experimental study tested whether “normalizing failure” could change early-career biology students’ common misconception that professional scientists are naturally talented and that students who struggle cannot pursue science. In the control group, class was taught as usual. In the treatment group, the instructor provided anecdotes of many different scientists experiencing failure – herself, other TAs, professors, and famous scientists – and gave students a minute to talk about their struggles at the end of each class. Both quantitative and qualitative results of this study will be presented. The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on data collection during the second semester of this study, and the effects of the pandemic on students’ career plans and perceptions of scientific professionals, will also be discussed.
Note: For greater accessibility, on-screen closed captions have been human-corrected to at least 99% accuracy. However, the original interactive transcript below the video has been generated by automatic speech recognition, with lesser accuracy.