RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Teachers’ approaches to genetics teaching mirror their perceptions of teaching controversial, societal and sensitive issues
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 350710
DO 10.1101/350710
A1 Tuomas Aivelo
A1 Anna Uitto
YR 2018
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/07/02/350710.abstract
AB The skills to understand genetic phenomena and transfer knowledge to real world situations are an important part of 21st century scientific literacy. While socio-scientific issues (SSI) are emphasized and impediments to considering SSI are widely studied, science teachers have low interest in adopting SSI in teaching. Little is known about how teachers choose content for their teaching, although this is the process in which curricula translates to teaching practice. We studied how teachers choose content for biology courses on cells, heredity, and biotechnology by interviewing ten Finnish upper-secondary school teachers. We asked which content they perceived as the most important and studied how they described teaching genetically modified organisms, hereditary disorders, and complex human traits. We used content analysis to build a tentative model of variables influencing teachers’ choices. We found three main categories of the most important contents: development of phenotype, inheritance and continuity, and gene function. While teachers mentioned that SSI are important, they were never mentioned among the important contexts. Teachers differed in how they described teaching: some embraced human-related content while others described avoidance due to content or pedagogy-related issues. The tentative model of teachers’ choices included national-level factors, which were common to all teachers, school-level factors as the local context and personal-level factors. We classified teachers’ perceptions to Developmental, Structural and Hereditary approaches in genetics teaching which contained not only the perceptions of the most important content, but also teacher inclinations towards teaching human genetics and perceptions of students’ interest in different topics. Teachers’ perceptions were strongly linked with teachers’ likelihood to discuss human genetics. Experience played a part in which approach teachers had, and contrary to previous research, the less experienced teachers were most open to discussing human genetics. Our results suggest that curriculum is an important tool encouraging teachers to adopt SSI-oriented teaching.Disclosure of conflicts of interest: T.A. has participated in writing biology textbooks for upper-secondary school biology for eOppi Oy and has received monetary compensation. None of the teachers involved in this study used biology textbooks from eOppi Oy.