Mitchell Cave

Recently, there have been increasing calls for integration of mathematics into scientific education. The standard for scientific education has always been the use of methods such as presentation of data and calculated procedures. These methods have been called into question due to their apparent lack of effectiveness in conceptual understanding and problem solving. While these issues are well studied in physics and chemistry, there is less knowledge on this topic in the biological sciences. Here, a required, undergraduate level course for biology majors will be examined through students’ ability to solve genetics problems to determine if a new method of mathematical integration, modeling, will be more effective and potentially break the habits of the old methods. Here we show that sensemaking instruction does increase students’ ability to solve an unfamiliar problem, instruction causes students to display a wider variety of problem-solving strategies, and greater number of strategies is associated with correctness. In comparison to previous work, this confirms past findings on student problem solving ability following sensemaking instruction (Schuchardt, 2016; Kuo & Redish, 2008). This is important because not only does it confirm previous conclusions on sensemaking instruction, but also provides insight into the effect on type and number of problem-solving strategies used. These finding matter because it provides an argument for the use of sensemaking instruction for the teaching of introductory, college-level inheritance. Further analysis will be done to observe potential patterns in order of strategy used.