This diploma thesis focuses on the education of genetics to grammar schools and students' comprehension of genetics. This abstract scientific discipline is considered difficult to learn so I decided to prepare educational materials with the aim to improve students' understanding of the topic. The main aim of the thesis was to prepare and test a didactic game focused on Mendelian inheritance and compare the effectivity of this kind of interactive education compared with the classical explanatory style of education. Other aims included evaluating the influence of other variables; comparing the difficulty of individual terms in genetics and the connection within chosen triplet of terms; and identifying the most common misconceptions. The data was collected in four classes of upper graders at two grammar schools by newly prepared questionnaire focused on demographic and knowledge. The results showed that the didactic game was as efficient as the classical explanatory method at creating short term knowledge Students had a bigger problem with explaining the connection among the terms than defining the individual terms. The most complicated term reported by the students was chromosome. It was the only term in which there wasn't any improvement between pre-test and post-test. Part of this thesis is also...

<p> There are three steps in planned learning: motivation, activity, and reinforcement. This project details the problems encountered by t eachers when they attempt to motivate and reinforce student learning. These problems in turn result in an emphasis on the selection of an activity. </p> <p> Of all the factors in motivation, it is proposed that an increase in one of them the willingness to learn will have a greater effect on learning than the choice of an activity, and that this increase can be accomplished by showing the students how the content to be learned can be immediately useful to them. </p> <p> The genetics unit from the grade thirteen biology course is amended in order to illustrate just how a teacher can alter a course to make it more useful to the students and yet still meet any future academic requirements. By having students apply theoretical knowledge to resolve life problems, it is suggested that student willingness to study is enhanced and the overall motivation to learn is significantly increased. </p> / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc)

This study analyses current and older Czech biology textbooks containing information and chapters about genetics. It also proposes suggestions for an update of textbooks content based on this analysis, and prepares methodical materials as help and possible inspiration for biology teachers.

The overall aim of this thesis is to investigate how teachers talk about genetics in actual classroom situations. An understanding of how language is used in action can give detailed information about how the subject matter is presented to the students as well as insights in linguistic challenges. From the viewpoint of seeing language to be at the very core of teaching and learning, this study investigates teachers’ spoken language in the classroom in topics within genetics that are known to be both crucial and problematic. Four lower secondary school teachers in compulsory school grade 9 (15-16 years old) were observed and recorded through a whole sequence of genetic teaching. The empirical data consisted of 45 recorded lessons. The teachers’ verbal communication was analyzed using thematic pattern analysis, which is based on the framework of systemic functional linguistics (SFL). The focus of the thesis is to determine how teachers talk about the relationships between the concepts of gene, protein and trait, i.e. the functional aspects of genetics. Prior research suggests that this is a central aspect of genetics education, but at the same time it is problematic for students to understand because the concepts belong to different organizational levels. In the first study I investigated how the concepts of gene and trait were related in the context of Mendelian genetics. My results revealed that the teachers’ way of talking resulted in different meanings regarding the relationship between gene and trait: 1) the gene as an active entity causing the trait 2) the gene as a passive entity identified by the trait 3) the gene as having the trait, and 4) the gene as being the trait. Moreover it was found that the old term anlag was regularly used by the teachers as synonym for both gene and trait. In the second study I examined how teachers included proteins in their lessons, and if and how they discussed proteins as a link between different organizational levels. This study showed that teachers commonly did not emphasize the many functions of proteins in our body. The main message of all teachers was that proteins are built. Two of the teachers used proteins as a link between gene and trait, whereas two of them did not. None of the teachers talked explicitly about genes as exclusively coding for proteins, which implies that the gene codes for both proteins and traits. The linguistic analysis of teachers’ talk in action revealed that small nuances in language used by the teachers resulted in different meanings of the spoken language. Thus, my work identifies several linguistic challenges in the teaching of genetics. / <p>This thesis is written within the framework of the Hasselblad Foundation Graduate School, a four-year programme financed by the Hasselblad Foundation.</p>