Children's beliefs about inherited characteristics

Abstract

Thirty two children (6 to 13 years) of average ability from three schools in Vancouver were interviewed about their beliefs regarding the phenomenon of inheritance. The study was purely exploratory. No hypothesis was tested. The subjects were exposed to five tasks, comprising twelve pictures, one live plant specimen and twenty questions. The first three tasks were designed to find out whether the subjects could differentiate between environmentally induced deformities and inherited traits in living organisms. The last two tasks were designed to find out whether the subjects invoke probability thinking in predicting the outcome of an offspring's inherited traits or not. The data collected was analyzed using tabular techniques: (a) Frequency distribution table. (b) Question-Response table. The results indicate that a large proportion of the subjects from the various age groups had difficulties differentiating between environmental deformities and inherited traits. Since the difficulties and the successes with the three tasks investigating the problem were found in all the age groups, it was suggested that possibly the acquisition of this concept is not dependent on age but is rather a function of the subject's experiences. On the other hand, the development of the thinking related to the making of probabilistic predictions was believed to be developmental. Younger subjects (6 to 9 years) were rigid and predicted with certainty; whereas the older subjects (10 to 13 years) made very imprecise and tentative predictions about the outcome of the offspring. i i i This finding and others which are reported in this study about children's thinking regarding the phenomenon of inheritance, should help the curriculum developer and the classroom teacher in deciding how best appropriate learning opportunities could be provided for children (average ability) of the age groups that were studied.

Assessment of Genetics Understanding

“…In the domain of evolution, for example, Nehm and colleagues have shown that measures of undergraduates' understanding are impacted by the taxon included in the item, the scale of evolutionary differences, the familiarity of the taxa and traits, and the polarity of evolutionary change (e.g., the gain or loss of a trait) (Nehm and Ha 2011;Nehm and Reilly 2007;Nehm and Ridgway 2011;Opfer et al 2012). Similar to these findings in evolution, Clough and Driver (1986), Kargbo et al (1980), Freidenreich et al (2011), Shea et al (2015, and Ware and Gelman (2014) found that situational features can play a significant role in genetic reasoning and argumentation. As a result of these findings, Shea et al (2015) developed a geneticsreasoning model that explicitly highlights the role of context effects.…”

“…Therefore, an important question in genetics education is which situational features impact particular types of problem solving, and how our understanding of these factors can be leveraged to improve teaching, learning, and assessment. We tested whether item difficulty was associated with situational features, which was expected given extensive prior work in cognitive psychology and a growing body of work in genetics education (Chi et al 1981;Kargbo et al 1980;Mayer 2013;Opfer et al 2012;Ware and Gelman 2014). In all of these studies, attending to the situational features was not required for successful problem solving, but such features nevertheless impacted participants' scientific reasoning.…”

“…It is worth noting that Shea et al (2015) and Kargbo et al (1980) studies documenting situational effects in genetics, and Nehm and colleagues' work documenting situational effects in evolution, both employed open-ended tasks. It is possible that task format is contributing to our inferences about situational effects on biological reasoning.…”

“…An important early study on elementary school children by Kargbo et al (1980) found that while students held intuitive notions that environmentally acquired characteristics could be transmitted to offspring, the belief did not transfer uniformly across questions featuring representatives from familiar plant and animal taxa. Humans were presumed to inherit acquired traits more often than dogs, and trees were rarely presumed to inherit such traits.…”

On Developing Content‐oriented Theories Taking Biological Evolution as an Example

“…Bishop & Anderson, 1990;Brumby, 1984;Ferrari & Chi, 1998;Settlage, 1994), or when characteristics acquired during a lifetime are inherited, (e.g. Bishop & Anderson, 1990;Engel Clough & Wood-Robinson, 1985b;Kargbo, Hobbs & Erickson, 1980;Ramorogo & WoodRobinson, 1995;Thomas, 2000;Wood-Robinson, 1994). …”