The Dominance Concept Inventory: A Tool for Assessing Undergraduate Student Alternative Conceptions about Dominance in Mendelian and Population Genetics.

ABSTRACT: Despite the impact of genetics on daily life, biology undergraduates understand some key genetics concepts poorly. One concept requiring attention is dominance, which many students understand as a fixed property of an allele or trait and regularly conflate with frequency in a population or selective advantage. We present the Dominance Concept Inventory (DCI), an instrument to gather data on selected alternative conceptions about dominance. During development of the 16-item test, we used expert surveys (n = 12), student interviews (n = 42), and field tests (n = 1763) from introductory and advanced biology undergraduates at public and private, majority- and minority-serving, 2- and 4-yr institutions in the United States. In the final field test across all subject populations (n = 709), item

SUBMITTER: Abraham JK 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4041511 | biostudies-literature | 2014

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature