Innovative Genetics Exercise

1
Innovative Genetics Exercise
Womens Science Learning and Succeeding from the
Margins,1998 Ch3 Margaret Eisenhart and Elizabeth
Finkle, pp 61-90

• Relies on constructivist learning theory
• Students need opportunities to develop their own
  understanding of science
• Students learn best when the instructor serves as
  facilitator rather than disseminator
• Students should engage in science for its process
  (discovering scientific principles while
  collaborating with peers) rather than its
  products (getting the right answer)

2
Innovative Genetics Exercise
Womens Science Learning and Succeeding from the
Margins,1998 Ch3 Margaret Eisenhart and Elizabeth
Finkle, pp 61-90

• Students experienced the process of developing,
  presenting and revising models.
• Students applied and learned this skill by
  practicing in familiar contexts, like modeling
  the outcomes of five different cookie recipes
• Students compared cookie appearance (phenotypes)
  with cookie recipes (genotypes) in order to
  understand the influence of inheritance
  (ingredients) versus environment (baking
  temp/time).
• Students then created a simple model of dominance
  based on Gregor Mendels 1865 paper describing
  his work with pea plants.

3
Innovative Genetics Exercise
Womens Science Learning and Succeeding from the
Margins,1998 Ch3 Margaret Eisenhart and Elizabeth
Finkle, pp 61-90

• Students applied their simple model of dominance.
• Students applied their dominance model to simple,
  computer-generated organisms
• The model works well in some cases and does not
  work in others
• In order to explain more complex inheritance
  phenomena exhibited by the computer model,
  students develop new, more complex models
• Selected models are presented to the class, and
  used to predict outcomes of the computer
  simulation
• Students continued to revise models to account
  for increasingly complex simulations.

4
Innovative Genetics Exercise
Womens Science Learning and Succeeding from the
Margins,1998 Ch3 Margaret Eisenhart and Elizabeth
Finkle, pp 61-90

• Final results
• Students (men and women) who has succeeded in
  previous science courses tended to do better.
• Men who did not succeed in previous science
  courses also tended to do better.
• Women who did not succeed in previous science
  courses did not improve in this course.
• The hypothesis for the lack of improvement of
  certain men and women is that these students
  resisted identifying with scientists, and thus
  resisted behaving like scientists.