UC San Diego

This thesis examines how undergraduate biology students made meaning from repeated Scientist Spotlight assignments across weekly reflections and a final course reflection. Scientist Spotlights are inclusive curricular assignments that pair scientific content with narratives about counter-stereotypical scientists. Student reflections were coded for broad themes and specific codes related to Diversity, Humanizing Scientists, and Self-Efficacy. Using distance-based redundancy analysis with Jaccard dissimilarity, logistic regression, and student-level clustering, this study compared the structure of weekly Scientist Spotlight assignments with final course reflections, tested whether weekly themes predicted final-reflection themes, and examined whether featured scientist characteristics and identity alignment helped explain variation in reflection content. Weekly assignments and final reflections differed in overall code composition. Weekly assignments more often emphasized concrete observations about individual scientists, such as scientist qualities, challenges, barriers, and pathways into science. Final reflections more often emphasized broader synthesis, including motivation, confidence, belonging, self-efficacy, and changed views about who can participate in science. Self-Efficacy showed the clearest weekly-to-final association, while Diversity did not show the same direct carryover pattern. Featured scientists and scientist features explained some variation in weekly reflections, but student-level response style and response complexity accounted for larger portions of variation. These findings suggest that Scientist Spotlights function not only as representation-based interventions, but also as reflection-based learning experiences. The results support using repeated Scientist Spotlight reflections and final synthesis prompts while also highlighting the need for future studies that test prompt wording, cumulative exposure, scientist selection, and identity alignment more directly.