Gregor Mendel and the chi-squared test

A resource aimed at advanced biology students, this worksheet provides a template for students to work through Gregor Mendel's classic pea breeding experiments showing the results of the genetic cross. The template includes prompts for students to set out their working clearly, showing parental phenotype, genotype, gametes and offspring genotype and phenotype. The second page of the worksheet provides a template for students to work through an analysis of Gregor Mendel's actual results using the chi-squared test. A data table is included in order to determine whether results are significant or not; note that this is one of the rare cases where non-significance (between observed and expected data) actually lends weight to a theory - Mendel's results are not significantly different to those proposed by his theory.

Key words: Mendel, genetics, pea, breeding, cross, diagrams, monohybrid, chi-squared, statistics, observed, expected, data