Central Valley Region Interdisciplinary Symposium on Education Research

To retain diverse students in STEM fields, we need to engage interests and motivations in introductory science courses (Tanner, 2013; Dewsbury and Brame, 2019). For diverse students, the strongest motivators to pursue STEM degrees are tied to prosocial values and cultural connections to their families (Jackson et al., 2016). A strategy called “values affirmation” can harness these motivators and support students who may experience negative stereotypes in academic settings (Jordt et al, 2017); however, the reasoning process and what students have to say about learning in these affirmations has not had a systematic framework for teaching and learning purposes. To that end, this study is interested in why metaphor matters and how Biology classrooms could be transformed by engaging student voices. We employed this value affirmation exercise in three introductory Biology classes as an intervention to obtain a better understanding of student’s self-efficacy and attitudes to help reduce the achievement gap within STEM students. The participants in this project were students enrolled in a medium-sized rural public university in the western U.S. which enrolls about 10,000 students. This study surveys a corpus of students’ work for conceptual metaphors to illustrate how learning experiences and values have been internalized and shared. We found that metaphoric analysis offers critical knowledge about cognitive and affective experiences, with various teaching and learning applications. We found that conceptual metaphors are rich and structured frameworks to gain perspective on motivations and self-efficacy factors. Underrepresented groups have emotionally charged experiences related to science and understanding how these experiences are conceptualized can inform future pedagogy. The use of figurative language and metaphors provides insights into student social and psychological support systems, student values and student logic in an introductory science setting. Overall, our study reveals that conceptual metaphors are rich expressions of values and aspirations.

Lorraine Ramos, Ph.D. Candidate, UC Merced