The major finding of the study was that students begin the biology
program with similar attitudes toward biology, but, by
the fourth year, high-performing students have significantly
more expert-like attitudes than low-performing students. In
addition, while students became more expert-like in their
general interest in biology and real world connection, there
was little change in attitudes related to problem solving. In
general, we found that student attitudes after 4 yr of a degree
program are, irrespective of performance, still far from
expert-like.