Final Report - River East Collegiate

My apologies for the lateness of my report!!

1. My class was unable to complete the project as designed because I ran out of time with them! I was involved with two Bio 40S classes for five weeks (four weeks of independent teaching) after which I was completed my degree (Bachelor of Education)!! Unfortunately the timing within the course was not perfect for this project. So we managed to get the survey done together but did not get into the particular area of human genetics far enough to really use the data properly! When I do get my own class I anticipate student involvement in data manipulation and report writing.

2. The most important idea and procedure (that I think the students are exposed to): Collection of data via direct survey (ie. you have to bug people!!). The connection between an observable trait (phenotype) and its inheritance.

3. I think the outcome of the project was fabulous! It was great to have an opportunity to incorporate collaborative learning in a very user friendly environment. I hope that similar projects are around when I get my own class!

4. I think the project was well organized and affords various levels of learning to occur (as shown by the younger participants!). I am curious if any post secondary classes have been invited to participate? I am thinking of other concepts that could be extended for their learning and perhaps for advanced high school students. For example, if the data was geographically separated would there exist some observable phenotypic frequency differences? Another concept would be to extend on the idea of gene frequency and its affect on phenotype frequency - genotypic frequency calculations, Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium, etc.

5. I think I included my ideas in number 4!

6. The thing I liked the most about the project is that it is somewhat of a discrepant event. It is very easy to have the mindset that the dominant phenotype will occur more frequently than the recessive phenotype and the data clearly does not support this idea. So, even though I personally have substantial genetics training it caught me by surprise and made me rethink how I present dominant and recessive phenotype (it depends on the gene frequencies!).

7. Again, I was the person doing the data manipulation and I would have ideally had the students do the manipulation. I simply downloaded the checked data into Excel, using Excel the columns were added and then the phenotypic frequencies were calculated using the category total divided by the total surveyed. I did a QA check on the frequencies by taking their sum (should be around 1.0). Everything looked good.

8. The frequency range of the dominant traits was 19.7% to 66.0% (not including colour blindness).

9. I think I would have had students think about the connection between phenotypic frequency and dominance and I think they would have determined the relationship to be the frequency of the dominant allele in the surveyed populations (at least I hope that's where I could have lead their thinking!).

10. My students and I did get to talk about the inheritance of colour blindness as we had a three generation family surveyed that exhibited red-green colour blindness (easy and useful phenotype to explain X-linked inheritance).

Thanks again for the opportunity to be involved with so many classrooms!!

Mrs. K.