Background: The idea is to integrate biology curriculum with social issues so that students can make connection between classroom and real world, thus preparing biology majors to take social responsibility in the future.

By asking to do similar type of exercise every other week on different biological topic I think biology majors would see the world in different way than they do now.

Objectives Directly Taught or Learned Through Discovery

Identified Learning Targets

Biology objectives: expression and transfer of heritable information 1.Students will learn about inherited diseases. (Heriditary) 2. Different forms of alleles. 3. what is genotype? 4. what is phenotype? 5. what is heterozygotes and homozygotes? 6. what is complete and incomplete dominance of allele? Social objectives: Learners will understand why it is important to learn this, by understanding how previous applications of genetic theories to social and public health policies in American history has caused difference in attitude towards various illness. Basic mathematical skills

What is sickle cell disease? What are the effects of sickle cell disease? How do you get sickle cell disease? Explain Punnett Square probability for a couple at risk for a child with SCD and other hemoglobin variants (X). Is there more than one type of sickle cell disease? How does sickle cell disease affect pregnancy? What are the risks of sickle cell disease during pregnancy? Why is it especially important for black women to know about sickle cell disease? Why is sickle cell more common in certain races and ethnic groups? Draw and analyze the Punnett square

 What must all students know and be able to learn as a result of this experience?

Know Chromosome, gene, nucleus, mitosis, meiosis

Will learn Allele, genotype phenotype, homozygous, heterozygous, heredity and expression of gene.

Overview

Students will be working in group of three, with each one preparing one of the first three topics. Each student presents the work of other student; this will help everyone in the group learning all the objectives of the project. The idea behind this is that students learn best from their peers. For the last question Critical thinking and reasoning where each student will provide their views about the question and audience are allowed to debate on the presenter’s view.

Google apps that I would use for this course would be google drive and google scholar. Google drive allows students to save files that can be accessed from anywhere that has internet connection. Google drive allows to create google docs google presentation, thus allowing each teams to be connected in online platform. For this course the students are also required to read some articles about the history of sickle cell anemia in the USA.

The learning theory that I would like to concentrate would be social learning theory of Bandura. According to this theory people learn from the interaction of their behavior, cognitive and their environmental influence.