When Elli Theobald asks her University of Washington biology students whether a doctor's job is to get the best outcomes for their patients or to tell the truth, she's not looking for a simple answer. The point is to make them wrestle with the messy, real world—where ethics collide with science, and power shapes outcomes.
That kind of nuance is rare in biology classrooms. University of Washington researchers examined nearly 3,000 science guidelines and assessment questions from 16 major sources—including MCAT practice questions, AP Biology tests, and Washington state science assessments—and found that only about 200 elements, roughly 7%, made any meaningful connection to real-world societal issues. The vast majority of what students are expected to learn and be tested on treats biology as a set of isolated facts divorced from the world they'll actually live in.
This gap matters. Lead researcher Carly Busch, a UW postdoctoral fellow, explains that students rarely encounter real-world connections because of a perception that such examples don't belong at the core of a course—they're seen as addendums, extras, something to squeeze in if there's time. But that mindset misses something fundamental: students who see how their science connects to society become more engaged, and engagement drives whether they stick with a major.
The researchers found that when real-world connections did appear in curricula and assessments, they clustered around ethics and public health—areas where the stakes for humans are obviously high. But even these were often vague. The American Association of Immunologists, for instance, listed "implications" of a diphtheria antitoxin discovery as an advanced topic without specifying what those implications actually were or why they matter. Compare that to a bioinformatics course that explicitly asks students to weigh the good and bad implications of having their genome sequenced at a doctor's office or through direct-to-consumer testing. The difference is stark: one prompts students to think critically about science and society; the other leaves them guessing.
Madison Meuler, a UW doctoral student and co-author of the study published in Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Science Education Research, points out that many educators assume real-world context can wait—that if a student is going to pursue science professionally, they'll learn about societal implications later. But that reasoning overlooks something crucial: most students in intro biology classes won't become scientists. Some will never take another science course. For them, biology might be their only chance to understand how science shapes politics, health policy, and their own lives.
The research also reveals what's at stake for science itself. When biology education stays locked in the lab, it doesn't just fail to engage broader audiences—it fails to develop students' scientific identity or help them see themselves as people who can think scientifically about the world. That disconnect ripples outward into a society where citizens struggle to evaluate scientific claims in the news, where misinformation spreads unchecked, and where science becomes something that happens to people rather than something they can understand and critique.
Theobald's Introductory Biology course shows one path forward. By asking students to grapple with genuine dilemmas where biology meets ethics, power, and human consequence, she's training them not just to know biology but to think like informed citizens in a world shaped by scientific discovery. That's a model worth scaling far beyond Seattle.