Investigating Undergraduate Student Misconceptions Regarding Pedigree Analysis

• Published in: The FASEB journal Vol. 33; no. S1; p. 454.13
• Main Authors: James, Olena, Boury, Nancy, Grimes, Zachary, Reid, Joshua, Wasendorf, Chloe, Couch, Brock, Seipelt‐Thiemann, Rebecca
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology 01-04-2019
• ISSN: 0892-6638; 1530-6860
• DOI: 10.1096/fasebj.2019.33.1_supplement.454.13

Genetics is a difficult topic for undergraduate biology students to comprehend because the topics are , complex, use specific terminology, and require thinking across multiple scales, including the symbolic scale. Education regarding the most basic genetics concepts begins in mid‐elementary grades with distinct concepts repeated and built upon through high school. However, students also transfer information from popular culture and through making their own meaning of observed phenomena. Therefore, when students arrive to a genetics course, they have pre‐instructional knowledge about genetics topics some of which are misconceptions and/or naïve conceptions. The aim of this project was to investigate common misconceptions and naïve conceptions in undergraduate courses for pedigree analysis. Pedigree analysis is a common tool that involves thinking across the symbolic scale, distinct terminology, and the application of Mendelian and non‐Mendelian genetic principles. Open‐ended questions were used to gather student answers for three distinct learning objectives. Student answers were analyzed and grouped according to each student's conceptual errors. Terminology, the ability to gather the appropriate information from questions, and the symbolic nature of pedigree analysis were major problems for students and represent major, cross‐cutting problems with many genetics concepts. In addition, students' answers also revealed problems with understanding autosomal versus sex‐linked inheritance as well as confusion about the nature and relationship of genes and alleles. Furthermore, some students used reasoning associated with population level genetics, which shows a lack of understanding about mathematical probability and its relationship to inheritance for an individual. Future studies aim to utilize these data to investigate a schema theory approach to formation and organization of conceptual understanding for pedigree analysis.
Support or Funding Information
NSF Award : 1710262
This is from the Experimental Biology 2019 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this published in The FASEB Journal.