Moving Genetics Education Beyond Mendel Can Reduce Racial Prejudice

Genetics education affects how students explain racial inequality. For example, when students learn about race during Mendelian genetics, they believe more strongly that racial inequality is genetically determined. In contrast, studies tentatively suggest that if students learn about the complexity of genomics and race it can reduce this same belief. In this article, we investigate for the first time how different types of genetics instruction interact to affect three different conceptions of race that influence how students make sense of racial inequality: (a) genetic essentialism, (b) racial colorblindness, and (c) social constructionism. Through a pre-registered cluster-randomized trial (N = 1063 biology students in N = 6 states), we show that the ideal instructional sequence to reduce essentialism, avoid colorblindness, and increase constructionism is to introduce students to the models of Mendelian genetics and then move beyond these models and highlight their limitations using insights from genomics that refute racist assumptions. This work demonstrates that a genetics education that explores simple and complex forms of inheritance in the right order and for the right purpose can mitigate racial prejudice.