Collecting "Real" Data in a Middle School Classroom

Genetics Survey

When it is time to teach about genetics I have my students do a quick tried and true activity that every life science class in the world does. Students look at observable Mendelian traits. They record their traits and look at the class and team data as a whole to see if there are any trends in the data. We also use this as a jumping off point for discussing dominant and recessive traits.

Last year my Curriculum Coordinator approached me to team teach a lesson on this topic. She proposed extending the lesson by creating a digital survey. We then challenged the students to push the survey out to as many people as possible. We wanted them to try to collect data from all 50 states and all 7 continents.

The big question is "Are dominant traits more frequent than recessive traits in a large population?" This lesson also promotes digital citizenship by showing students how quickly things can spread online and showing them ways to use social media that they might not have thought of before.

Last year we collected approximately 2000 responses. This year the students were challenged to collect more data than the previous year. Students are much more interested in this activity using real data that they collect than if I were to just tell them an answer. They feel ownership of the data. They love to get updates on where in the world we have collected responses from and how many responses we have collected. Additionally, this survey gets them thinking about ways to collect data and the validity of that data.

Our survey is pretty simple. It is a Google Form and the results come back to us in a spreadsheet. As of right now we have 3785 results. Feel free to help us out by taking our survey below



Here are the results of the survey.