Genetics is not only a school topic in biology, but it is also becoming increasingly important in everyday life. Genetics provides answers to many everyday questions, such as: "Why is a friend better at basketball?". It is therefore essential that students understand the basic knowledge of genetics, for which we, as biology teachers, are largely responsible. Students need to be taught the knowledge of genetics in an interesting and clear way because they can benefit from it in life. At the same time, traditional teaching, where the aim is to memorize large amounts of data, could be replaced by attractive teaching methods. Thus, shifting the emphasis to the integration of information and student activity. In addition, biological research is advancing very fast, resulting in teachers often lacking the necessary didactic knowledge to design appropriate and instructive activities for teaching genetics.
Therefore, in this master's thesis with qualitative research, we analysed and defined proposals for activities in genetics, which were published in the journal The American Biology Teacher from 2010 to 2020. A basic form was filled out for each article. The form included the year of publishing, authors, home country of authors, number of pages, number of cited sources, type of article, level of education, the structure of the article, brief description, and whether feasibility is possible in Slovenia.
We found that the theoretical foundations are very intertwined with the topics in the analysed articles. The misconceptions mentioned in the theoretical foundations are also presented in the articles. In addition to presenting misconceptions, articles often describe activities that prevent misconceptions or reshape misconceptions. Many activities have been given in the articles to strengthen students’ understanding of genetics. A lot of research was also presented, which supported the theory with a large majority.
By analysing the articles, we want to show a set of activities that are useful for interesting teaching of genetics at different levels of education. In addition to making activities more interesting, it also reduces misunderstandings of genetics.
With this master's thesis, we want to encourage biology teachers to carry out educational and interesting activities that would reduce the generally poor understanding of genetics in classrooms. We dare to say that with mentioned activities genetics will be much more understanding for the students.
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