Educational potential of phylately to study Mendelian Genetics

Abstract

Stamps are a reliable reflection of human history and culture with a didactic potential yet to be explored. Here I present a teaching experience that uses all postage stamps issued to this date to honor the figure of Gregor Mendel and those belonging to postal series in which he is included (56 pieces from 13 countries). A questionnaire was developed with which students of the subject of Basic Genetics from the 2nd year of the Biology Degree worked autonomously on the thematic unit of Mendelian Genetic Analysis. Afterwards, a reinforcement session was performed to clarify the misconceptions or errors identified after the correction of this activity. Subsequently, the experience was evaluated by means of a multiple-choice test. When marks from this study were compared with those obtained by students from the four previous academic courses (who did the same test but did not use the philatelic material to prepare the unit), an average increase of 2.8% was detected in the marks (82.8% of correct answers).