Scientific Inquiry and Fast Plants
Rebecca Smyth
2001 - 2002 Fellow

In this activity, students grow Wisconsin Fast Plants to help them learn more about genetics and scientific inquiry. Our primary reason for introducing these plants to class was to give students a tangible experience with quantitative variation and heritability that would broaden their understanding of genetics beyond Mendelian inheritance and could facilitate conceptualization of natural selection in the future. Growing these plants also provided a reference for lessons in plant development, life cycles, photosynthesis, reproduction, nutrition, and experimental design. In a long term, multi-generational, experiment like this the notebooks and records that students kept became obviously and critically important. Download the activity in MS Word orPDF format.