We describe a newly developed summer genetics course based upon active learning within a social community. To gauge the success of the course, we examined the attitudes of 72 genetics students on a continuum from novice to more expert-like thinking using the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey for Biology (CLASS-Bio) (Semsar, Knight, Birol and Smith, 2011). The study occurred during two summer courses in 2015 (N=55) and 2017 (N=57) that were designed as active learning communities. By the end of the course, the perceptions of students in both years became more expert-like or positive in all categories on the CLASS-Bio. There were both substantive (Cohen’s d effect size ≥ .3) and statistically, significant (p ≤ .05) differences between pre-and post- means in the following categories in 2015: Problem-Solving Synthesis & Application, Conceptual Connections, and Problem-Solving Strategies and in the following categories in 2017: Enjoyment, Real World, Problem-Solving Synthesis & Application, Problem-Solving Effort and Conceptual Connections. We demonstrate that there were significant shifts in student attitudes towards more positive and expert-like views in a newly designed summer genetics course. These results were consistent in both of the years.

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