Acceso usuarios
Marissa Echevarria
Knowledge construction and scientific reasoning of 7th-grade students were examined during a 3-week inquiry unit in genetics, in which anomalies were used as a catalyst for student learning. Students used genetics simulation software to develop hypotheses and run tests of fruit fly crosses in order to develop mental models of simple dominance trait transmission. Instruction was intended to support discovery of anomalous patterns and development of explanations. Qualitative and quantitative analyses indicated that student explanations showed a significant shift toward greater explanatory power of the anomalous inheritance patterns. However, this shift did not occur evenly. Students were more likely to propose hypotheses and explanations for the more frequently occurring anomaly and more likely to run the test that produced that outcome relative to the less frequently occurring anomaly. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
