Undergraduate R Programming Anxiety in Ecology: Persistent Gender Gaps and Coping Strategies

The ability to program in R, an open-source statistical program, is increasingly valued across job markets, including ecology. The benefits of teaching R to undergraduates are abundant, but learning to code in R may induce anxiety for students, potentially leading to negative learning outcomes and disengagement. Anecdotes suggest a gender differential in programming anxiety, with women experiencing greater anxiety. Currently, we do not know the extent to which programming anxiety exists in our undergraduate biology classrooms, whether it differs by gender, and what instructors can do to alleviate it. Instructor immediacy has been shown to mediate related anxieties such as quantitative and computer anxiety. Likewise, students’ use of adaptive coping strategies may mitigate anxieties. We investigated students’ R anxiety within a lower-division ecology course and explored its relationships with gender, instructor immediacy, classroom engagement, and reported coping strategies. Women reported significantly higher R anxiety than men, a gap that narrowed, yet persisted over the semester. In addition, several specific coping skills were associated with decreases in R anxiety and increases in self-concept and sense of control; these differed by gender identity. Our findings can guide future work to identify interventions that lessen programming anxiety in biology classes, especially for women.