What Do You Know About Genetics? A Study of How Age, Gender, and Educational Level Affect Knowledge of Genetics

Overview

Objectives/Goals The purpose of this research was to determine some of the common misconceptions about genetic knowledge in order to illustrate the need for additional research and expand and update curriculum in genetics. Methods/Materials We came up with a variety of questions related to genetics,some are old wives tales' and some are facts. We created a web site and posted these questions. The site was www.geocities.com/navforce2003m. We requested responses from a variety of home-school and neighborhood newsgroups as well as state and national 4-H groups. We also left fliers asking for responses at our school, UC Riverside and with our parents' co-workers. The responses were printed, graded and logged in a Microsoft Excel database, and these results were then summarized into charts and graphs. Results Our research shows that women with Bachelor's Degrees scored better than the other groups, even men and women with Master's Degress and PhD's who scored lower than anticipated. Conclusions/Discussion Our results indicate that no one gender or educational level displayed a thorough knowledge of the subject matter, even at the basic level we tested. This gap between knowledge and the current applications of genetic engineering should be explored in more detail.

Competition history

• CSEF 2003 Behavioral Sciences · Entry S0310

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

• All Behavioural and Social Sciences projects
• CSEF Behavioural and Social Sciences projects
• Every CSEF 2003 project