Difficulties Experienced by High School Students when Learning Basic Mendelian Genetics.

WO RECENT PAPERS (Stewart 1980; Finley, Stewart, and Yarroch 1980) have suggested that researchers should focus attention on the content of instruction as an important research variable. Finley, et al. surveyed high school science teachers to determine what content they thought was most important and most difficult for their students to learn. In biology, over 50 categories were provided for teachers to rate with respect to difficulty and importance. A summary of the results, indicating the 15 most important and difficult categories, is presented in table 1. The results indicate that genetics is an area that is both important and difficult for high school students to master. As a result of this survey, a research program has been developed to increase our understanding of students' learning and meaningful problem solving in genetics. The initial phase of that research will be reported here.