Undergraduate Students Reasoning about Genetic Mechanisms

In genetics, a domain with a vast impact on citizens’ lives, mechanistic reasoning is challenging. In order to promote the ability to reason mechanistically in genetics, we should first understand what knowledge students need in order to be able to provide mechanistic explanations in this domain. In this study we interviewed undergraduate students studying toward a biological sciences degree and asked them to explain several complex genetic phenomena. We analyzed those interviews via two complementing perspectives – a mechanistic perspective and a cognitive perspective for domain-specific reasoning. We identified the type of domain specific knowledge used by students for reasoning and their use of domain general principles for mechanistic reasoning. We found that domain specific knowledge is used to operationalize domain general principals such as identifying and unpacking entities and linking between different parts of the suggested mechanism. We also found that domain-specific knowledge is used for re-visiting one’s own explanation.