Testing Common Misconceptions about the Nature of Human Racial Variation

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Media Archive, Social Science, Teaching Resources, United States on 2019-02-19 19:29Z by Steven

Testing Common Misconceptions about the Nature of Human Racial Variation

The American Biology Teacher
Volume 79 Number 7 (September 2017)
pages 538-543
DOI: 10.1525/abt.2017.79.7.538

Amelia R. Hubbard, Associate Professor
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Wright State University, Dayton Ohio

Race is a hot-button topic in American society, but one that needs to be addressed in the biological science curriculum. This paper examines how college students in a large introductory course came to understand race through the exploration of four key concepts about the nature of human biological and genetic variation. Using clicker data collected from four courses (n = 296), change in starting and ending understanding of content was compared using paired t-tests and mean difference scores. Results indicate statistically significant improvement in student understanding of common fallacies of the “biological race concept” after a single exposure to content.

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