Race has been a longstanding topic in the biology textbook curriculum. Yet, there appears to be no research investigating whether the treatment of race in modern biology textbooks impacts how students conceptualize race. In the present study, a double‐blind field experiment employing mixed‐methods is used to investigate the impact of textbook‐based genetics learning on essentialist conceptions of race amongst adolescents. The study was carried out in an eighth grade classroom in a California Bay Area School. Students recruited for the study (N = 43) read either a racialized or a non‐racialized textbook passage on human genetic diseases and completed a reading comprehension assessment. After a short distracting task they responded to items in two different race conception instruments. Controlling for race, gender, age, prior race‐conceptions, and reading comprehension, statistically significant effects were observed on both race conception instruments by treatment. Students in the racialized condition exhibited stronger essentialist conceptions of race than students in the non‐racialized condition. Additionally, an exploratory analysis indicated that an understanding of Mendelian heredity moderated the observed treatment effects. The findings of the present study tentatively suggest that textbook‐based instruction in school biology can inadvertently reinforce essentialist conceptions of race that underlie racial bias. Implications for teaching and research are discussed. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 51: 462–496, 2014

For over a century, genetic arguments for the existence of racial inequality have been used to oppose policies that promote social equality. And, over that same time period, American biology textbooks have repeatedly discussed genetic differences between races. This experiment tests whether racial terminology in the biology curriculum causes adolescents to develop genetic beliefs about racial difference, thereby affecting prejudice. Individual students (N = 135, grades 7–9) were randomly assigned within their classrooms to learn either from: (i) four text‐based lessons discussing racial differences in skeletal structure and the prevalence of genetic disease (racial condition); or (ii) an identical curriculum lacking racial terminology (nonracial condition). Over 3‐months that coincided with this learning, students in the racial condition grew significantly more in their perception of the amount of genetic variation between races relative to students in the nonracial condition. Furthermore, those in the racial condition grew in their belief that races differ in intelligence for genetic reasons significantly more than those in the nonracial condition. And, compared to the nonracial condition, students in the racial condition became significantly less interested in socializing across racial lines and less supportive of policies that reduce racial inequality in education. These findings show how biology education sustains racial inequality, and conversely, how human genetic variation education could be designed to reduce genetically based racism. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 54: 379–411, 2017

When people are exposed to information that leads them to overestimate the actual amount of genetic difference between racial groups, it can augment their racial biases. However, there is apparently no research that explores if the reverse is possible. Does teaching adolescents scientifically accurate information about genetic variation within and between US census races reduce their racial biases? We randomized 8th and 9th grade students (n = 166) into separate classrooms to learn for an entire week either about the topics of (a) human genetic variation or (b) climate variation. In a cross‐over randomized trial with clustering, we demonstrate that when students learn about genetic variation within and between racial groups it significantly changes their perceptions of human genetic variation, thereby causing a significant decrease in their scores on instruments assessing cognitive forms of prejudice. We then replicate these findings in two computer‐based randomized controlled trials, one with adults (n = 176) and another with biology students (n = 721, 9th–12th graders). These results indicate that teaching about human variation in the domain of genetics has potentially powerful effects on social cognition during adolescence. In turn, we argue that learning about the social and quantitative complexities of human genetic variation research could prepare students to become informed participants in a society where human genetics is invoked as a rationale in sociopolitical debates.

This field experiment manipulated the racial framing of a reading on human genetic disease to explore whether racial terminology in the biology curriculum affects how adolescents explain and respond to the racial achievement gap in American education. Carried out in a public high school in the San Francisco Bay Area, students recruited for the study (N = 86) were randomly assigned to read either a racially framed or a nonracially framed textbook passage on genetic diseases as part of a unit on Mendelian genetics. Afterwards, they responded to two instruments measuring belief in the biological/genetic basis of race and one measure that recorded their explanations of the racial achievement gap and their willingness to volunteer their free time to fix it. Results demonstrated that students in the racially framed condition exhibited significantly greater agreement in the genetic basis of racial difference than students in the nonracially framed condition. A content analysis of students’ explanations of the achievement gap also demonstrated that a significantly greater proportion of students gave genetic explanations of the achievement gap in the racially framed condition compared to the other condition. Furthermore, students’ prior beliefs about race interacted with the reading treatments to affect students’ willingness to fix the racial achievement gap.