The Science of Learning Science - Why It Can Feel Hard (and What Helps)

This is Ask a Biologist, a program about the living world, and I'm Dr. Biology. We spend a lot of time on this podcast talking about science, but what about the scientist? After all, science just doesn't happen. It's driven by people, and in particular, people who ask questions, follow their curiosity, and sometimes struggle, just like the rest of us, as they try to understand how the world works. Today we're talking with Caitlin Cooper, a professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University. Her work involves something you might not expect in a science class, how learning science connects to mental health. She leads a research lab where her team looks at students, graduate researchers, and even professors, and asks questions like, what helps people succeed in science? And just as important, what gets in the way? She uses ideas from psychology, the science of how we think and feel, to understand how things like stress, confidence, and even failure can affect learning. Sometimes that means looking at data and surveys, and other times it means listening to people's real stories and experiences. One of our newest projects is called Fail Safe Science, a series of videos and a podcast that helps students see failure in a new way, not as something to fear, but as a normal part of learning and discovery. Her work has been featured in places like the New York Times and the BBC News, but at its core, it's really about one simple idea, helping people feel better so they can learn better. Welcome to Ask a Biologist, Caitlin. Thank you, thank you for having me. And do you prefer Caitlin or Katie? Katie's great. Katie's great, okay. Well, I've been looking forward to this, because this show is a lot about listening to the scientists, and we often forget to mention the things that went wrong, the struggles they might have had. And unless you're rather unusual, just about everybody's had some kind of a struggle in their life. So this will just be a great way for people to understand that they're just like everybody else. And maybe those that are out there staying away from science because of anxiety or some other things, they might say, hey, I can do this. So before we get there, what kind of a scientist would you describe yourself as? I am what they call a biology education researcher. So I study how students learn biology best. And to do that, I mentioned a little bit about psychology. But what are the tools for this? Well, lots of people come from a bunch of different backgrounds. So we draw from traditional education fields. We also need to know the biology in order to understand how students learn the biology. And then my lab and our researchers are really interested in that psychology component, how emotions and experiences affect students when they're in the classroom. So we draw a lot from clinical and social psychology too. Okay. Now, I mentioned you do a lot with what we call undergraduate, graduate level and professors. Professors have just as much trouble as anybody else and sometimes more, I suppose. But what about high school and middle school? I mean, I always look back and it seems like in elementary school, everybody's a natural scientist and nothing gets in the way. And it seems like we have a tendency to ruin them, right? It's almost like we break them going forward and we start losing them. What's going on there? Yeah, absolutely. So very early on, people start hearing that they are not a science person or they're not much of a math person or they're not very creative or they're not a music person. And it becomes talked about in this binary. And it's based on very little evidence. If you think back to your own experience, you know, sometimes a parent says, oh, it's okay, you're just not a math person. I wasn't a math person either. And in fact, it's based on like one test in the first grade or something. And it becomes a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy because then if you go into the next math class and you don't do so well on the first test, then you explain it by I'm just not a math person, right? And you don't go try again because you don't see a point in trying. And so that starts in how we're raised and kind of socialized very early on to think of ourselves as either a science person or not a science person. And then that would often just stick with people up through college and into their adult life. And so it's really important to help people rethink some of those assumptions, especially as they get into high school and college. Right. And when you say science, you also brought up math, mathematics. And it's interesting because that's what I call a cop-out. A lot of people just say, oh, I'm not good at math. The reality is you haven't done any practice. It's like if I go into athletics or something and I say I want to pitch a ball or I want to hit a golf ball or I want to, you know, kick a soccer ball type of thing. If I want to do any of those things, I have to practice. It's the same thing with mathematics. What's missing sometimes is between that and the sports is a lot of people enjoy the sports. And so they keep practicing because they just enjoy doing that. With mathematics, unless they find a purpose for that math, they sometimes don't stick with it long enough. My biggest point here is I just want to make sure that for those out there that say I'm not good at math, really, you probably are. You just haven't had to use it. And if you have a need, you would do well on it. Okay. Let's go back to biology. I mean, because you're in the life sciences here. What does that actually mean? So we really want to understand how people tackle complex biology problems and how they actually learn biology concepts. And a lot of people will focus on how do we teach biology best or what learning strategies can students adopt. And my research in particular falls more along the lines of, as you said earlier, what's getting in the way? What is preventing students from maximizing their learning opportunities? So all of that is encompassed in that broader field of biology education research. Okay. So then how do you do this? We can do a bunch of different kind of approaches to answer some of our research questions. And I would say that when we really don't have any insight into a research question, for example, when I started as a researcher, we had very little information about how mental health and how students' well-being affected them in the classroom. And in turn, how the biology courses actually affected their mental health and well-being. And so when we don't have that information, we'll start with an interview study. Because I think it's really, really important to hear straight from the sources, right? It's not always very helpful to hear from their teachers or their instructors about what they think is going wrong, but instead to hear from students, how are you being affected or what are the feelings that you're having? And then we can build on interview studies by doing survey studies that allow us to have a better sense of how many other students feel this way or do more students feel a particularly different way, right? And so the surveys allow us to see patterns at scale. And then finally, another aspect of the research is developing interventions. So if we want to really better students' mental health in a particular biology course, we could develop an intervention, but then do an experiment to actually test if it's effective, if it's working. So emotions and learning science. And so it's kind of that question of why do some students feel nervous in the classroom, especially a science classroom, and can worry or stress make learning harder? So let's talk a little bit about that. Let's do the first thing. Students feeling nervous in class. Now there are students that feel nervous in class, probably doesn't matter the subject. And then there are those that are going to be nervous in that science class. And it's probably the ones that say I'm not good at math and that sort of stuff. How do we deal with the emotions of learning? Well, I think it can be really helpful to understand why you're feeling stressed or why you're feeling nervous. And my research has really found that there are usually one of three reasons why it's affecting you. So the first is that you don't want to fail, which is a completely normal and reasonable emotion, right? But you don't want to do poorly on a quiz or you don't want to fail an exam. And if you've been told you're not a science person all your life or you don't feel like you have the background that you need for a So that's one reason. Another reason is that we know that students learn really well when they work together and have discussions and tackle activities together. And so they learn better that way than just simply sitting there listening to a lecture. But students have social anxiety, right? There are some people who really don't want to turn to their neighbor and talk and share what they're feeling or share what they're thinking. And this is particularly true if you think about you might share an answer that's totally wrong, right, in a biology class. And again, something about biology is you might look around and everybody around you, you think is super smart and meant to be there. And so the last thing you want to do is share the wrong answer. And so a lot of stress in biology courses comes from that fear of judgment of other people. And then finally, you might feel stressed if you don't feel like you belong, right? If you don't have friends in the course, if you don't feel like you're seeing other people who look like you, if you don't have people in the class who have similar values to you, that can be very stressful. So if you can identify what is causing the stress for you, then hopefully that's something that you can work with either by yourself or ideally with your instructor or teaching assistants to try to figure out, you know, how do we lessen some of that stress? Yes. And one of the three you mentioned, and it comes up over and over, failure, fear of failure, right? And so making mistakes and failure in science, actually, those are pretty natural, but why are mistakes important in science? And can getting the wrong answer help you learn? Yeah, those are really good questions. Mistakes are so important in science and that is not the answer we want to hear, right? Because as you said, we hate making mistakes. It makes us uncomfortable. But as scientists, our job is to solve problems and to figure out how things work. And in the journey to figuring out how something works or to solving problems, you usually have to figure out what doesn't work. And that is all part of the trial and error and making mistakes. And so I think for scientists, we have to become really comfortable with making mistakes over time. And you have to be a really confident person to be okay with making mistakes because then you're not thinking the mistake is your fault. You're not thinking that the mistake is going to happen again and again and again. And in fact, you're going to see, okay, what can I learn from this mistake? And how can I re-engage with this particular problem? And that's exactly why making mistakes are really helpful for our learning. Because if we think about just a simple biology problem, right? So you're doing a multiple choice problem, if you know the right answer and you guess the right answer immediately and you kind of move forward, I'm not sure how much you learned, right? But if you select the wrong answer first, then you might feel those feelings of like frustration or disappointment. But you have to think about like, oh, why did I get that wrong? What was I thinking that made me get that wrong? And then you have to think about, oh, well, why was this right? And you're going to learn far more than probably if you had guessed the right answer to begin with. And so making mistakes is just something that is just very naturally part of science. So I think anyone who wants to be a scientist, the earlier you can be comfortable making mistakes, the better because you just can continue to practice how to rebound from that. And it's just going to be something that is really, really helpful for your learning if you can view it that way. Right. Anyone who wants to go in the world of science and actually do just about anything in life, if you have failure or failure, you're going to have a problem. So you need to figure out how to deal with that, right? When scientists do experiments, they often do not know what the outcome is going to be. Otherwise, they wouldn't be doing the experiment. So we often will say an experiment failed or sometimes it's a matter of the process. You know, I did electron microscopy. There's a lot of prep for those samples. You could have something you did wrong during the prep and then the sample is ruined. And that could take sometimes weeks before we could actually go to look at it in step two in day two of a two week experiment. You ended up making a mistake, but you didn't know it until two weeks later. Let me tell you, it is not a fun thing to experience, but I guarantee you, you don't do it again because you just make things better. You figure out the process to make sure you don't repeat those sort of things. I'm only mentioning it because, you know, I'm just like anybody else. I have made mistakes and you have to figure out how to recover from them, right? But I think that that's really important that you're willing to share that and talk openly about that because something that we see is a lot of scientists, that's not part of their stories that they talk about, right? They talk about all the things that went right because that's what we want to remember. We want to remember those positive things and we're often asked questions about what went right and how we got to where we are. But being open and honest about some of those failures, which is a really strong word, right? As you said, sometimes science just fails, but then it's labeled a failure, can be really helpful because it helps, right? Hopefully students, whether you're in middle school or in high school or in college, recognize that, oh, this setback is something that really successful scientists experience all the time. And there are those times where you can make a mistake and it actually leads to discovery, interestingly enough, right? We could have a whole show on those. Matter of fact, that might be a fun one to do someday. All the mistakes that happened that turned into amazing success stories down the road. Yeah, and actually those are some of our only examples of failures when you look into it. Like when you talk to a graduate student about, you know, successful scientists who have failed, it's, oh, look at this amazing Nobel Prize winner who had this failure. Well, I don't know how relatable that is, right? And so I think that those stories are really important. And then I think that example you gave is so great that, you know, actually something happened in week two and you don't even realize it happened until month two. And there's not a lot of good that came from it, right? You really have to think through, you know, obviously you learned something, but sometimes failures are just really, really frustrating. So this is great. We're talking about mistakes and I've already confessed that I've made many mistakes. So I'm just going to say, I've made a mistake. What do I do now? Yeah. So it's really, what don't you do now? How you think about a mistake is going to affect how you end up handling the mistake. Determines a lot about what they're going to do next and how they're going to address the mistake. And so the things that people want to avoid, or at least be aware of, is that when you make a mistake, some people tend to internalize it. They tend to think that this is all my fault and it has to do with something that is inherent inside of me that I can't change. So again, maybe if I did not do well on a science quiz, I would say, I'm not a science person. I'm not going to change that. That's not going to be helpful. The other thing that wouldn't be helpful is to globalize that mistake. So to think about all the different ways in your life that that mistake could affect your life. So for example, again, you maybe failed a biology quiz and you might think, great, I'm going to fail this whole class. I shouldn't be a biology major. I should go ahead and change my major. I'm never going to be a medical doctor, etc. So if you're globalizing that little mistake, that's again going to make you feel more hopeless about that particular event. And then finally, it's how are you looking at this mistake as something that is kind of isolated and it just happened, okay, I failed this exam or this quiz and maybe I'll do something different next time. Or are you thinking, I failed this quiz, which means I'm going to fail all the other quizzes and this is never going to change. And so how we view our mistakes, I gave you three negative ways of viewing the mistakes and you can flip that on its head and think about the positive ways of viewing a mistake. But you want to avoid those and you want to catch yourself when you might fall into that trap of thinking about mistakes like that. Because if you do, you'll feel hopeless and then it's really hard to go back and fix that mistake and move forward. And instead, we want to be hopeful that that was an isolated incident and we can learn from it and move forward. You also mentioned belonging and that's another piece because if you can't picture yourself as a scientist, and there are certainly people out there that don't have a role model or someone to see that, how do we address that? Because that's one of the challenges. And one of them we can actually very simply say is women in science, right? I'm going to be biased. I think in the biological sciences, we've done a much better job of women in science than some of the others that I will not mention. We have. But let's talk a little bit broader about it. It's not just women in science. No. And in fact, something I study is there are so many of our identities that you can't see, right? Maybe you're religious. Maybe you're LGBTQ. Maybe you struggle with your mental health. You can't really look to your teachers to see, am I represented, right? And yet religion or being LGBTQ or struggling with mental health can be really integral parts of who we are, something that we think about multiple times a day. And what our research has found is that A, students aren't actually alone. Scientists certainly do share these identities. But B, they're often reluctant to share them. Often they think it's just not relevant. And what we know from students, again, from talking to them in some of the interview studies is it would be incredibly relevant to know a scientist who shares my identity because then maybe I feel less alone in this community. And so something we study is if an instructor shares something about themselves, say they're LGBTQ, they can do it in less than three seconds, right? It doesn't have to be an hour-long story. It can just be this is part of who I am. And if they share that information, it will actually benefit most students in the class. So not even just students who also share the identity, but most students in the class because most students in the class also have something about them and it helps them see the instructor as more human. And so I think that that's something that we all can work on as scientists and figuring out, you know, do we have any of these identities that are concealable, that might even be stigmatized, that we feel comfortable sharing with our students because we want to normalize that this identity can exist in science. You can be a Christian and you can be a scientist, right? You can be depressed and you can be a scientist. And so I think that sharing that information is really powerful because we certainly don't ever want a student to think that they don't belong in our community because of who they are. In particular, religion is one of those things that has been typically thought of as polar opposite, you know, science and religion, two different sides. I would have to say that a significant number of my colleagues are religious, many different kinds of religion, and they have certainly figured out how that fits within their mindset and I think it's great and it brings in more people that might have felt that it was at odds with what they were feeling. Katie, you started a project a couple years ago called Fail Safe Science. Now I'm hoping to go deeper into this in a follow-up show because I think it's so important, but let's talk a little bit about Fail Safe Science. Yeah, so when we were talking to undergrads and grad students about that fear of failure, right, this comes up all the time. Students really worry about having challenges and setbacks in undergrad and grad school and when they look around their lab, they do not see people who have failed. And in particular, they often look at their instructors and their research advisors as people who have had this really easy journey to where they are. And it's hard not to assume that, right? Maybe somebody is publishing a lot of papers or they've had a lot of success and you just assume it was such an easy road. And so we were hearing all this from students and once in a while I would mention it to some of my colleagues and my colleagues' responses were always to laugh because of how difficult their own journeys were, that it seemed so ridiculous that anyone would assume that they didn't struggle. And so we thought that that was such an interesting dichotomy. We have all these students who assume all these scientists have had this really, really easy, wonderful journey and we have all these scientists who say, oh my gosh, not at all. I failed so much. I struggled so much. I failed my comprehensive exams in grad school or I failed my first biology class ever. And it was just clear that no one had ever asked them to share this information. And so we started asking scientists if they'd be willing to make short videos, you know, under 15 minute videos sharing about a time that they really struggled. And not all of it's failure, right? It could be going through grad school while becoming a mom or it might be you failed your comprehensive exams or it might be you didn't know how to write when you got to undergrad and you had to learn how to write, which is actually a really difficult thing to learn how to do. And so there are all these challenges that we have scientists talking about. And the whole purpose is to normalize setbacks and challenges and help people realize that there is light at the end of the tunnel and that you can become this really incredible scientist. And also to help people realize that when you look at somebody, you're not seeing the full story, right? You're seeing the Instagram version of the scientist as opposed to the real life version and all that they've gone through. And we'll be sure to include a link in the show notes so that people can go check out failsafe science. Okay, I want to take a break. If you like this kind of podcast, and if you want to hear from more experts in their fields, check out Labcoat Optional, another podcast from Arizona State University. For each episode, host Pete Zoroka talks with researchers tackling real world problems, from water policy and energy demand to national security and digital privacy, without the jargon and definitely without the Labcoat. Find new episodes every other Wednesday, wherever you get your podcasts. Well, Katie, I don't let any of my scientists get out of here without answering three questions. This is something I borrowed from James Lipton in Actors Studio. I'm not going to ask the same three questions that he does. I'm going to ask ours. So the first one is going to be a little bit interesting because the first question, I'll tell you what it is. When did you first know you wanted to be a scientist? So now here's the question. When was it that you first knew you wanted to be a scientist? Or did you realize you were going to be a scientist? I went through undergrad 100% sure that I was going to become a medical doctor. And in fact, I went to med school for a year and ended up figuring that I absolutely did not want to become a medical doctor, but that I loved the physiology. And so I made one of the hardest decisions I've ever had to make, which was to leave med school after my first year. I would say during that whole time, I'm not sure I would have considered myself a scientist. I was very, very focused on just becoming an MD and saw science as kind of a path to that. Afterward, I started really thinking more about education and some of the problems in higher education and some of the things that prevent students from succeeding and things that are often out of their control. And I would say that was the first problem that I really, really wanted to solve. And that's when I would say that I wanted to become a scientist, or I knew that I was moving in the direction toward becoming a social scientist. Okay, so the next question is, I'm going to take everything away from you right now. This is a thought question. I do not have that power, and if I did, I would not do that. You aren't going to be doing your research that you're doing here. I'm going to take away teaching, because obviously teaching would fit in that as well. I want you to think about if you could do anything, and just say you had the skill set in it, what would you do or what would you be? Hmm, this is a hard one. I would say if I had the skill set, so it can be completely unrealistic. I think I would want to see what it's like to be a professional athlete. I love watching women's basketball. I think how hard people train and the extent to which they're able to push themselves beyond what they perceive their limits to be is somewhat similar to what we do sometimes in science. It's just so conceptually different when it has to do with your athletic ability and performance. And that has always been something that I don't at all understand, because I'm really not… Watch me say I'm not an athlete, or I'm not an athletic person, but I will say, I think to your point, being athletic is not something I practiced often growing up. Maybe I'd try a life as an athlete just to see what it's like. It's interesting you'd mention that, because there are people that are good in a particular sport, but then there are the true high-level athletes, the very top. And it seems to me what separates them isn't so much the physical, it's the mental. This gets back to the idea of how you deal with the mental psyche, right? Yeah, absolutely. I think it's so interesting that in sports, having a sports psychologist is so regular and normalized now, and they're highlighting how important it is to performance, and yet we're just now figuring this out in academia, right? That maybe we need some academic psychologists to help us figure out how to boost our performance. Right. Okay, so now the last question, and I'm actually going to have you answer it two ways, okay? The last question is, what advice would you have for a young scientist, or perhaps someone who always wanted to do science, but maybe we're told that you're not a scientist and do something else. What advice would you have for them? And so I'm going to have you do that, and then when you're done, I'm going to ask you for what advice would you have for the parents and others that are mentors for those that are struggling, okay? So let's do the first one with the advice for the person themselves. I would say my advice for somebody who's interested in being a scientist is really answer the question why you want to be a scientist, and let that motivate you. Because I think that anyone who wants to be a science person, I truly believe can be a science person. And the motivation is what's going to really get you up in the morning, to get you to put that extra effort into practicing those science problems, to understanding different phenomena, to asking questions. And so if you can identify what excites you, and what's going to get you every day to think about science and work on science, that can be so important and certainly override what you have been told about your abilities. Perfect. All right, so what about those parents and the other mentors out there? What are we going to do to give them a little more skill set so they don't break them? It's not too late to walk something back, right? I think that many of us were raised in a time where we were handed a toy based on our gender, right? And that for men, that tended to be blocks and sciencey things or outdoorsy things. And for women, that often tended to be a cleaning set, right? Or a cooking set. And so, you know, it's not surprising that then, you know, people in these generations grew up to say, this is what you're destined to be, or you're not good at this. But it's okay to walk it back, right? It's okay to sit down with your kid and say, you know, I know we've always said that you're not a math person, but what if you are a math person? Or, you know, you really did awesome on that. Like, we should explore that more. And so I think, like, just not being afraid to say, we should rethink how we've been talking about what skill set you have. And I don't care if that is creativity, if that's music, right? This could be any skill set that maybe you've kind of labeled for your kids and that they are or are not a particular type of person and bring it back to, what are they excited about? What are they passionate about? What are they willing to work for? You know what? That sounds like a really good book that needs to be written. And it could even, the title, you know, you can walk it back or you do get a do-over. I could see all sorts of things, you know, where failures become success down the roads. Wow. We could have all sorts of fun. Well, Katie, thank you so much for being on Ask a Biologist. Thank you for having me. I think this is going to do a lot of good. And the students that you've been targeting, the undergraduate and the research graduate students and the faculty, it'd be really great just to be able to get them into fail-safe science. Absolutely. We just want to spread the word that setbacks are normal and that there's light at the end of the tunnel. So keep persisting. You have been listening to Ask a Biologist, and my guest has been Caitlin Cooper, a professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University. And hey, if you enjoyed this podcast, be sure to check out the episode notes. We're going to add some links in there to help you dig deeper. The Ask a Biologist podcast is produced on the campus of Arizona State University and is recorded in the Grassroots Studio, housed in the School of Life Sciences, which is an academic unit of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. And remember, even though our program is not broadcast live, you can still send us your questions about biology using our companion website. The address is askabiologist.asu.edu. Or you can just use your favorite search tool and enter the words Ask a Biologist. As always, I'm Dr. Biology, and I hope you are staying safe and healthy.