Using philosophy of science in curriculum development: an example from high school genetics

This paper describes a unique curriculum in which the students experience aspects of the ‘nature of science’ as they study classical genetics. In this curriculum, ‘Gregor Mendel’ presents his conceptual model of simple dominance and involves the students in a reproduction of his famous experiments with pea plants. The students read his paper and test his model using a computer simulation. Next, using the simulation, they are presented with a field population which expresses anomalous data. Working in research groups, they do genetics experiments and build conceptual models to explain their data and to make predictions about data that is to be generated. The problems require that students work from effects (phenotype) to cause (genotype models), such as those that professional geneticists would solve. Rather than the teacher presenting the content, students construct their conceptual models and present them to others within the class. Models have been constructed for a variety of anomalous data, including codominance, multiple alleles, X‐linkage, and autosomal linkage.