Research experiences are an integral part of training future scientists and fostering diversity in science. Providing culturally responsive research mentorship, defined as mentorship that incorporates cultural knowledge to improve learning experiences for a particular group, is a critical step in this endeavor. While culturally responsive mentoring is most commonly associated with mentoring students with underrepresented races and ethnicities in the sciences, it can also be helpful for mentees with a diversity of abilities, sexualities, economic backgrounds, and religions. In this essay, we discuss how mentors can provide more culturally responsive mentoring of Muslim research mentees in the sciences. Muslims are a stigmatized minority group in the United States who participate in a religious culture that often differs from the secular culture of science. Notably, there are few resources for how to engage in culturally responsive mentoring of Muslim research mentees. To address this gap, we drew from the extant literature on the challenges that Muslims encounter in the United States, which likely extends to the context of scientific research, and identified potential culturally responsive accommodations in research.

The purpose of the Current Insights feature is to highlight recent research and scholarship from outside the Life Sciences Education (LSE) community. In this installment, I draw together a collection of articles that explore the challenging emotions that emerge for teachers in learning and professional development contexts. Recent research has begun to deepen understandings of the role of emotions in learning—mostly studying students. The articles in this set extend that focus to teachers who, like students, can feel frustration, overwhelm, or fear when faced with challenges involved in learning. Insights from these articles can inform those working with teachers to support transformational change.

Investigating definitions of success and failure among introductory biology students is essential for understanding what underlies their self-efficacy; a student who gets a B on an exam may lose self-efficacy if they define failure as anything less than an A. Yet, whether students have the same definitions for success as they have for failure in these classes is unknown, nor how those definitions relate to course performance. To better understand student definitions for success and failure and their implications, this mixed-methods study collected survey data from students in two introductory biology courses about their definitions of success and failure and their self-reported grades. Coding of open-ended responses revealed four broad themes related to both success and failure: Performance, Content, Preparation, and Attitude. Although there were common themes in how students defined success and failure overall, individual students often (65%) described success or failure in relation to different standards. We also found some definitions of success and failure were predicted by grades. These results highlight the complexity of building self-efficacy in introductory biology and suggest the need for greater awareness and acknowledgment of the different standards students use to judge their success and failure.

Use of high-stakes exams in a course has been associated with gender, racial, and socioeconomic inequities. We investigated whether offering students the opportunity to retake an exam makes high-stakes exams more equitable. Following the control value theory of achievement emotions, we hypothesized that exam retakes would increase students’ perceived control over their performance and decrease the value of a single exam attempt, thereby maximizing exam performance. We collected data on exam scores and experiences with retakes from three large introductory biology courses and assessed the effect of optional exam retakes on gender, racial/ethnic, and socioeconomic disparities in exam scores. We found that Black/African American students and those who worked more than 20 h a week were less likely to retake exams. While exam retakes significantly improved student scores, they slightly increased racial/ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in scores partly because of these differences in participation rates. Most students reported that retake opportunities reduced their anxiety on the initial exam attempt. Together our results suggest that optional exam retakes could be a useful tool to improve student performance and reduce anxiety associated with high-stakes exams. However, barriers to participation must be examined and reduced for retakes to reduce disparities in scores.

Background: Mentorship is critical to success in postgraduate science, technology, engineering, math, and medicine (STEMM) settings. As such, the purpose of this study is to comprehensively explore the state of mentorship interventions in postgraduate STEMM settings to identify novel practices and future research directions. The selection criteria for reviewed articles included: 1) published between 2002 and 2022, 2) peer-reviewed, 3) in English, 4) postgraduate mentees, 5) a program where mentorship is a significant, explicit focus, and 6) a description of mentee outcomes related to the mentorship intervention. Overall, 2583 articles were screened, and 109 articles were reviewed.

Results: Most postgraduate STEMM mentorship intervention studies lack strong evidence to evaluate the effectiveness of the intervention, with only 5.5% of articles designed as randomized controlled trials. Most mentorship interventions (45.6%) were created for faculty, and few (4%) were for postdoctoral researchers. Also, only 18.8% of interventions focused on underrepresented groups in STEMM. Most interventions (53.7%) prescribed a dyadic structure, and there was more mentorship training for mentors than mentees.

Conclusion: Overall, these findings identify gaps in mentorship interventions and provide step-by-step guidance for future interventions, including a consideration for underrepresented groups and postdoctoral scholars, robust mentorship training, and more randomized controlled trials.