Introductory Biology Lab courses are often the first opportunity for students to learn practical science skills, including data collection and analysis, science communication, and critical thinking when analyzing data. However, students can often focus so much on learning these practical skills that they are unable to connect those research skills they learn in lab with broader social issues, including who decides which science gets funded, who belongs in science, and how research impacts society. To address this, we ask our intro bio lab students to reflect on these questions by working on short modular assignments. This publication will describe four such assignments: (1) Discussing ???Science under the Scope??? by Sophie Wang (https://freerads.org/2016/01/09/science-scope-1/), a comic series about science and social justice, (2) presentations based on the Scientist Spotlights Initiative Project (https://scientistspotlights.org/about-us/), an initiative committed to making the sciences more inclusive by highlighting diverse voices, (3) values affirmation activities in which students reflect on what values are important to them, and how those values shape how they live their life, and (4) descriptions of undergraduate research opportunities at your home institution, in which students explore the research of the faculty, lowering the barrier for students who don???t realize they can participate in research. These assignments have been implemented over several years in introductory biology lab classes at our institution.
Keywords: Introductory biology, DEI, Persistence
University of Manitoba (2025)
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