INTRODUCTION

While numerous factors have been shown to influence student learning and retention in undergraduate biology, an understudied area is the importance of affective components of learning (36, 37, 41, 43). Recently, biology education researchers have increasingly turned their attention to exploring student affective constructs, including sense of belonging (3, 14, 26, 34, 38, 41), self-efficacy (2, 3, 11, 41, 42), comfort (16), and science identity (7, 14, 41). One affective construct that has not been explored in the context of college biology classrooms is student academic self-concept.

Academic self-concept is one’s perception of one’s own ability in a specific academic domain (e.g., statistics, ecology, physiology) and is developed by one’s experiences within a learning environment, including academic interactions with peers and instructors (5, 31, 35). Academic self-concept is strongly influenced by one’s perceptions of the academic abilities of other students and can be measured by assessing a student’s perception of his/her academic ability in a domain compared with a group of peers in that domain (31).

Prior research on academic self-concept has shown that it can influence other affective constructs, such as self-efficacy and student motivation, as well as student in-class participation. Self-efficacy is defined as students’ confidence in their ability to perform a task (4) and is distinct from academic self-concept. Students develop self-efficacy by considering their abilities compared with the goal they are trying to achieve (4), whereas students develop academic self-concept by comparing their academic abilities in a domain with the academic abilities of other students (4). Ferla and colleagues (18) found that high school students’ academic self-concept in math strongly influenced their math self-efficacy or their belief that they would do well in the math course. However, there was not a reciprocal relationship between these two constructs; student self-efficacy did not influence student academic self-concept (18). Academic self-concept has also been shown to increase student motivation. In a study conducted with undergraduate students studying education, academic self-concept in education was found to be the strongest predictor of student motivation to study material for the course (33). Similarly, students’ academic self-concept in the context of a high school math course directly influenced their motivation to complete their math homework (24). Lastly, there is some evidence to suggest that students’ academic self-concept may influence their participation in class. In an interview study exploring undergraduate resistance to active learning, some biology students expressed that they were reluctant to participate in small-group discussion because they were afraid that other students might perceive them as less intelligent (12). Furthermore, in a case study of graduate students, nonnative English speakers expressed that one reason they were quiet during class was because they felt that their language abilities and content knowledge were insufficient to express themselves clearly (40).

Student characteristics, such as gender, race/ethnicity, and anxiety level, have been shown to influence student academic self-concept. For example, female high school students studying physics and chemistry were found to have a lower academic self-concept in each of these domains compared with men, even after controlling for a measure of academic ability (25). Similarly, high school women have been shown to have lower academic self-concept in math compared with their male peers (32). Student race/ethnicity has also been shown to influence academic self-concept. In a study exploring first-generation college students’ math academic self-concept, Asian and Latino(a) students had significantly higher math academic self-concept compared with African American students; white students’ math academic self-concept did not differ significantly from any other racial or ethnic group (15). Student anxiety level in the classroom may also be related to student academic self-concept. Students with low academic self-concept in nursing have been shown to be more likely to have high anxiety in academic settings (28). Thus a student’s characteristics may influence the development of his/her academic self-concept in a specific domain.

One framework describing the development of student academic self-concept is the internal/external frame-of-reference model, which suggests that academic self-concept is formed by both 1) internal comparisons, or a student’s comparison of his/her abilities in different domains (e.g., a student’s ability in math compared with his ability in English); and 2) external comparisons, when a student compares his/her ability in a domain to the abilities of other students (31). Historically, studies have explored external comparisons by measuring students’ conceptions of their abilities as they compare with the abilities of a large group of peers in a domain (e.g., an entire class). However, we propose that a student’s external frame of reference can also be formed by the student’s perception of his/her academic ability compared with another student with whom he/she works closely in class. In a class in which a student’s frame of reference is largely based on with whom he/she works during class, then groupmates would likely influence the development of that student’s academic self-concept (12, 13). Thus a student in physiology has an academic self-concept in physiology relative to the collective ability of the class as a whole, but he/she also has an academic self-concept relative to the ability of a single student in class with whom he/she works closely; these two academic self-concepts may be different, depending on how similar the person with whom he/she works most closely is to the rest of the class. For example, a student may perceive that she is smarter than most of the students in her physiology class and thus have a high academic self-concept relative to the class as a whole, but she may perceive that the groupmate with whom she works on problems in class is much better at physiology then she is, and thus she would have a low academic self-concept relative to that particular groupmate. Both perceptions may influence a student’s overall academic self-concept in physiology.

As we transition college sciences courses from traditional lecture to student-centered active learning, there are more opportunities for students to compare themselves to other students in the class. In active learning classes, students regularly have opportunities to compare themselves to the whole class. For example, instructors in active learning often use clicker questions to poll the class about a concept, and then instructors often reveal what the class as a whole answered and sometimes what percentage of the class answered it correctly. Thus students can compare their own answers to the answers of the class and get a sense for how many other students had the correct answer. Students also have opportunities to compare themselves to individual students in the class. Sometimes instructors pair clicker questions with whole class discussions where instructors ask individual students to share their ideas in front of the class, so everyone in the class can compare his/her own thinking with that student’s thinking. Commonly, instructors have students work with partners or in small groups in active learning, where students frequently share their ideas and hear the ideas of a small number (approximately one to three) of other students. Because of these repeated interactions, we propose that students likely develop an academic self-concept in biology relative to individuals with whom they work frequently in addition to an academic self-concept relative to the whole class. We predict that students’ characteristics may have an even greater influence on their academic self-concept relative to a student in their group, because previous studies have shown that students’ characteristics can influence their experiences in active learning classrooms where students are working in groups (12, 16). For example, Eddy and colleagues (16) showed that men are more likely than women to prefer a leader/explainer role in a small group, and women are more comfortable in small groups when they work with a friend. Furthermore, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, intersex, and asexual (LGBTQIA) students report being concerned that students with whom they work during class will perceive them as less competent if their LGBTQIA identity is revealed (12). These studies highlight that student characteristics can influence student experiences in active learning classrooms, but it is unclear whether these characteristics could also affect student academic self-concept in biology, and particularly their academic self-concept relative to other students with whom they work in active learning classes. Furthermore, it is unknown whether a student’s academic self-concept in biology has an impact on his/her experience in the classroom, particularly whether academic self-concept influences how students interact during active learning.

In this study, we explored student academic self-concept in an upper-level physiology course taught in an active learning way. We set out to answer the following research questions: