A Study on the effectiveness of experiments in Genetics teaching with history of science

• Main Authors: YANG, TZU-YING, 楊子瑩
• Other Authors: LIAO, LI-JEN
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2019
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/g43x9e

碩士 === 國立高雄師範大學 === 科學教育暨環境教育研究所 === 107 === The purpose of the research is to explore whether using an instruction module of experiments in Genetics teaching with history of science, would help target students target students acquire geneticist-like thinking competencies more effectively. The research is performed by adopting the one-group pretest-posttest design method. Through convenience sampling, 38 sophomore Biotechnology students of a national university in southern Taiwan are selected, with the group consisting of 23 males and 15 females. The instructor designed a set of module of experiments in Genetics teaching with history of science, and adopted three instructional strategies—studying geneticists' research papers, group discussion, and hands-on important genetic experiments. Instructions are given through report based on the history of Genetics, as well as through lab operations. The research tool is based on the situational questionnaire “Thinking like Morgan—The Case of Drosophila” (Liao & Lin, 2016), with an internal consistency reliability of 0.85. Questionnaires are conducted during both pretest and posttest. The following results are then analyzed by the Wilcoxon signed-ranked test, providing quantitative data and supplementary qualitative data to help identify before and after differences in thinking skills. After analysis, the following conclusions were reached: First, it is shown that college students have immensely elevated their geneticist-like thinking competencies. Second, geneticist-like thinking competencies contain nine thinking skills. After instruction, college students' skills in observing, evidence-finding, hypothesizing, experiment designing, and predicting have shown tangible improvement, while the other four skills remain less implemented. This indicates that the instruction module of experiments in Genetics teaching with history of science still falls short of all-inclusive essential skills. Third, college students believe that the instruction module implemented has indeed helped to self-reinforce geneticist-like thinking competencies.