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Innovative Genetics Exercise. Women’s 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
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Innovative Genetics Exercise Women’s 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)
Innovative Genetics Exercise Women’s 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 Mendel’s 1865 paper describing his work with pea plants.
Innovative Genetics Exercise Women’s 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.
Innovative Genetics Exercise Women’s 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.