final report

Final Report from Yr 10 Biology at St. Pauls' Brisbane,Australia. Our students appreciated that they could all contribute to the project and they enjoyed surveying their families for the observable traits. However a number of students expressed concern with the reliability of their observations when thumbs or pinkies had been altered by environmental influence on the phenotype. Having collated their class results the students compared these with the web results. ( We had to use results from the spring 1999 project because of the time constraint of our rotating classes.) For most traits our class and school ratios were very similar to the world results. However the white forelock is a much rarer phenotype in all our surveys than in the totalled web results. The fact that many of the ratios were not in the expected 3:1 ratio caused much discussion of the possible reasons, though at this stage few of the students have sufficient experieence to be able to analyse beyond monohybrid crosses of heterozygous parents. The project highlighted a major misconception of the students that a dominant trait must be more frequent in the population. They found it easier to assume that there was an error in the information they had received. This will certainly change the way in which I introduce Dominant and Recessive alleles.

We thank-you for the opportunity to be part of a global scientific study and look forward to involvement in similar projects in the future.