Moving “beyond Mendel” in genetics education can reduce racism, new study suggests

(Press-News.org) Data from a series of randomized trials in the United States suggests that if teachers move genetics instruction toward more complex genomics concepts, they can help students have a more scientifically accurate understanding of race. This can protect students from believing in unscientific notions of genetic essentialism, including the idea that inequality is genetic. People who believe in genetic essentialism believe – among other ideas – that most racial differences are determined by genes. Essentialist beliefs are a biological misconception. Around the world, students receive a basic genetics education that focuses on single-gene in-heritance; students learn Mendel’s laws of heredity, and how different versions of a gene (i.e., alleles) are inherited across generations through probabilistic mechanisms that are easily modeled by a Punnett square. This is a risk factor for the development of genetic essentialism during adolescence, say Brian Donovan and colleagues in their Policy Forum. They advocate for teaching genomic concepts in a way that refutes genetic essentialism in a framework they call “humane genomics education.” The authors point to randomized controlled trials (RCTs) conducted in the U.S. that already demonstrate that teaching 8th- to 12th-grade students about key related concepts can cause a reduction in students’ genetic essentialist beliefs about race. One of these concepts is that most genetic variation occurs within geographic populations, rather than across them. Results of related studies show students taught such concepts are more likely to disbelieve genetic essentialism because they are more likely to develop the perception that races are not that genetically different. However, these past RCTs have had key limitations, say the authors. To overcome them, they designed new cluster-randomized crossover trials – in which all participating clusters receive both intervention treatments (human genomics education) and control treatments (basic genetics education) consecutively, in separate time periods. Their studies were the first to explore how these two instruction styles affect racial conceptualization.

 

Between December 2019 and May 2022, the authors recruited 15 teachers and 1063 biology students from six U.S. states (Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, New Jersey, and Massachusetts). Participating teachers received 40 hours of professional development to learn how to implement humane genomics intervention. According to results, students participating in the humane genomics classroom setting exhibited greater knowledge of genomics and less belief in genetic essentialism. Importantly, as students begin to disbelieve genetic essentialism, they also appeared to gravitate toward the belief that race is a social concept and that racial disparities are caused by prejudice. Basic genetics instruction, by contrast, yielded none of these benefits to students. To address concerns about scalability of their approach, the authors described results of an additional preregistered person-randomized trial they conducted with about 1000 under-graduates in the University of California system. Results suggest that humane genomics instruction can be scaled in a relatively cost-effective, time-efficient manner through an online platform, the authors say. “Several humane genomics learning experiences spread over many years of biology instruction will be needed to reduce the prevalence of genetic essentialist beliefs,” say the authors.

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