Microbiology students’ relatability to scientists is impacted by scientists’ identities and exposure to brief scientist highlights during class time

Representation in the classroom and students' ability to relate to scientists are essential for promoting engagement and success in STEM programs. Incorporating information about scientists from diverse backgrounds in the form of assignments increases student relatability to scientists and changes students' views of who can be a scientist toward non-stereotypical identities. However, building new assignments in an already filled curriculum, and identifying scientists from marginalized backgrounds who specifically fit foundational topics in the General Microbiology classroom may be difficult. Here, we evaluated an intervention to increase representation in the classroom that can be easily incorporated during classroom time. We developed 15 short scientist highlights to accompany the content of a General Microbiology course. These highlights included scientists from historically marginalized backgrounds by gender, race/ethnicity, country of origin, and gender identity. Our main research question was to determine if this intervention could increase students' ability to relate to scientists and increase their sense of belonging. We used a modified survey based on Schinske et al. (J. Schinske, M. Cardenas, and J. Kaliangara, CBE Life Sci Educ 14:ar35, 2015, https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.14-12-0231) and Estrada et al. (M. Estrada, A. Woodcock, P. R. Hernandez, and P. W. Schultz, J Educ Psychol 103:206-222, 2011, https://doi.org/10.1037/a0020743) to measure relatability to scientists and sense of belonging as a construct of students' scientific identity. We demonstrate that showcasing scientists from marginalized backgrounds during lectures and without the need to incorporate related assignments can be a simple yet effective strategy to increase students' ability to relate to scientists, while a sense of belonging appears to be a more complex construct with other factors to consider. Additionally, while all students were interested in learning about scientists' contributions to science, those who identify as women were also interested in the scientists' identities, especially when those identities reflected their own.