ASE Annual Conference 2018

In Biology, topics on inheritance, evolution and genetics often present considerable difficulties for students to achieve good conceptual understanding. Achieving understanding in science at the conceptual and functional levels is a worthwhile goal for students in school science. Work done in the author’s research group suggests that one way to obtain a better appreciation of students’ understanding on inheritance is to expose students to a hands-on enrichment program that focuses on inheritance at a science centre. Also, to better appreciate students’ understanding of evolution and genetics is to leverage on approaches commonly used in the educational psychology literature - for example, appending a confidence scale to two- tier multiple choice questions on these topics can provide valuable insights on not only how students perform in such tests but also allows for the extraction of a suite of quantitative measures related to the metacognitive aspects of learning as well. The presentation will focus on these and other aspects, and would be illustrated with suitable examples from the topics of inheritance at upper primary level as well as evolution and genetics at the high school level.