Abstract Background Undergraduate laboratory courses can offer students a chance for legitimate science participation in ways that may influence how they view themselves in science. Using a blind-selection design, our study directly compared the impact of a traditional laboratory curriculum with a science-as-practice based laboratory curriculum on factors related to students’ social integration into science. Our study took place in the context of a large-enrollment, introductory biology laboratory course at a Hispanic-Serving Institution. The science-as-practice based curriculum was Authentic Inquiry through Modeling in Biology (AIM-Bio), which provided students with epistemic agency as they proposed and tested biological models. We used the Tripartite Integration Model of Social Influence (TIMSI) to assess laboratory students’ science self-efficacy, science identity, and science community values, before and after the course. Results Through mixed-effects modeling and ANCOVA analysis of survey results from 1,436 participants, we found positive curricular effects of AIM-Bio, including a novel effect on science community values. Additionally, we measured lower initial science self-efficacy amongst Hispanic/Latine laboratory students compared to non-Hispanic/Latine students, but this difference was no longer evident among students who participated in the AIM-Bio curriculum. This suggests a curricular-specific effect on the science self-efficacy of Hispanic/Latine students. Conclusions Our results show that engaging students in legitimate participation in science practices supports the development of factors that influence undergraduate students’ integration into the science community. Because these factors have previously been shown to predict entry into a STEM career, our findings suggest a potential link between the nature of laboratory curricula and undergraduate STEM persistence. Our findings have implications for understanding persistence among populations who are less likely to graduate with STEM degrees.
Thomas et al. (Sun,) studied this question.