Teaching for genetics literacy in the post-genomic era

Abstract

Research in genetics and genomics is advancing at a fast pace, and thus keeping up with the most recent findings and conclusions can be very challenging. At the same time these recent findings and conclusions have made necessary a reconceptualization of genes and heredity, both in science and in science education, beyond the mostly gene-centred view of the twentieth century. The teaching of genetics at schools should have a key role in helping students achieve genetics literacy. However, the literature on research in genetics education reports persistent difficulties and misunderstandings. We first consider the public understanding of and the attitudes towards genetics. Then, we review the most recent literature and present the most typical conceptions found among secondary students in various countries, ages and backgrounds. We argue that particular factors such as intuitive thinking, teachers, textbooks, and the media affect students’ development of erroneous or outdated ideas related to genetics. Finally, we suggest how these problems might be addressed in order for genetics teaching at the secondary level to fulfil the aim of contributing to students’ genetics literacy in the current post-genomic era.

Keywords:

• Genetics
• genomics
• genetics literacy
• misconceptions
• teaching
• learning
• teachers
• textbooks
• students’ understanding
• public understanding

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation [project number 100019_162679].

Notes on contributors

Florian Stern is currently working on his PhD in science education at University of Geneva, Switzerland. His main research interests include the conceptual understanding of genetics and its interconnections with psychological intuitions.

Kostas Kampourakis is a researcher in science education at the University of Geneva, as well as the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Science & Education and of the book series Science: Philosophy, History and Education. He is the author of Turning Points: How Critical Events have Driven Human Evolution, Life and Development (2018), Making Sense of Genes (2017), and Understanding Evolution (2014). He is also the co-editor, with Ronald Numbers, of Newton's Apple and Other Myths about Science (2015), and the editor of The Philosophy of Biology: A Companion for Educators (2013). He is currently co-editing, with Michael Reiss, a book on biology education that will be published by Routledge in 2018. His main research interests include the teaching and the public understanding of evolution, genetics, and nature of science.

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the financial support of the Swiss National Science Foundation (project number: 100019_162679) during our work on this article. We are also grateful to the editor, Jim Ryder, and the anonymous reviewers for their useful comments.

Notes

1. http://www.nextgenscience.org.

2. https://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/Draft%20PISA%202015%20Science%20Framework%20.pdf.

3. In this article, the term ‘genetics’ is used rather loosely to refer to all kinds of research on biological inheritance, including genomics.

4. This is actually a summary of a more complex definition which was reached after an in-depth conceptual analysis. The complete definition is this: ‘Genetic material: any nucleic acid [composition] in the cell [localisation] that interacts with other cellular components and transmits a specific message determining the sequence of other molecules [structure] and thus results in particular, but often quite variable, outcomes inside or outside the cell [function]. These nucleic acids are (usually) reliably copied and maintained from generation to generation, preserving their structure and resulting in the same functions in similar environments (robustness), though with a range of variation in functions and consequences that depends on cellular and environmental conditions (plasticity). The functions of particular portions of the genetic material may affect or be implicated in cellular processes with local (cellular) or extended (organismal and even environmental) impact; this allows the assignment of fitnesses to particular differences in the genetic material’ (see Burian & Kampourakis, 2013, pp. 623–624).