Table 4.

Students’ assessment of the contribution of the laboratory project to their understanding of the five major content goals^a

Statement	Mean 2003 (n = 75)	Mean 2004 (n = 60)	Mean 2005 (n = 72)
A. The 5-wk project studying the red and white yeast (this project has also been referred to as FGPB) helped me to understand the central dogma—how information “flows” from DNA to RNA to protein.	2.0	2.0	1.8
B. The 5-wk project (FGPB) helped me understand how the sequence of nucleotides in a gene provides the information to make a protein.	1.8	1.9	1.8
C. The 5-wk project (FGPB) helped me understand how the sequence of amino acids of a protein determines the structure of the protein and to recognize the relationship between the structure of a protein and its function.	1.9	2.1	2.1
D. The 5-wk (FGPB) project helped me understand mutation, its random nature, and the relationship between mutation and variation.	1.6	1.8	1.7
E. The 5-wk project (FGPB) helped me understand how a series of chemical reactions, each one catalyzed by a specific enzyme, can result in the production of essential “building blocks” of the cell and to understand the consequences of an inability to carry out one of the chemical reactions in the series.	1.7	2.0	1.8

^aStudents used a scale (1, strongly agree to 5, strongly disagree) to respond to each statement.