Bloodtyping - A Reflection

[Erin Nash]

Let's reflect over what we have learned concerning blood typing so far. You might want to say a thing or two about blood-typing in general. How does the actual process work?

In addition, what stuck out to you about our classroom data? Do you feel it was representative of our Benton population as a whole? What about the population of St. Joseph, or even Missouri? Was there anything odd about our data that was rather unexpected?

A few questions to consider about our data -
Was our sample size large enough?
Was it random enough?
Does it have to be random to be representative?
How big would it have to be to be truly representative?

Don't just state your opinion here - back your statements up with actual evidence.

OUR DATA
A - 35%
B - 0
AB - 20%
O - 40%
How does our class data compare to that data you examined in the reading today? Similarly, how did what you learned from your websites and from fellow classmates' sites contribute to your learning about blood types?

Finally, what questions do you still have?

[ricky maddox]

Blood typing was a lot of fun, because it was a very simple process and it was pretty cool. The first thing you have to do is stab yourself in the finger, then you put your blood on the card in the appropriate place, add the chemicals and mix. It was cool to watch the clotting happen, even though I fell into the universal donor category.

I was really surprised to find out that our class was predominantly O type blood, I was fully expecting A dominance. Another thing that stood out was the fact that we had four AB blood type people in our class the reading indicated that AB was extremely rare so to have four in a group of only eighteen was exceptional. I think that the O blood dominance and the low (zero) B showing up is a defiant representation of Benton's Population because we are low on African American students. I do not however think that it represents all of Missouri because there are areas like St. Louis that has a higher African American population, to increase the B blood types.

I thought it was pretty cool that our class, predominantly white, represented almost exactly the results for the white USA stuff. All and all it was a good experiment and I look forward to seeing where this is going.

[Chelsie]

Blood typing is when you take a sample of blood and various antibodies are put into three different samples. Antibodies code for type A & B blood type. If blood type B clots then your type B, if A clots your A and so on. If both A & B clot then you are type AB and if none of them clot then you are type O. Blood typing is important because if someone was in a bad accident and they needed a blood transfusion they need to know what blood type the are so that they can get the same blood type to put back into their body. If your blood type is one thing and tried to put a different blood type into your body it would reject it. Your body would not work properly and therefore you would die.

What stuck out to me in our classroom data is no one was type B. I was very surprised to see that .45 were type O. I thought that type B would have at least one person and type O would not be as many as there was. I don't feel that it was representative of our Benton population as a whole because one classroom is not accurate to the whole population of Benton.

Our class data some what compares to the USA whites because it has a low B number, the O numbers are the same, the A numbers are almost the same and the AB numbers in a way compare because they are both low. I learned a lot from the websites and from what we learned in class. I learned that blood types go into further detail in explaining a person. I learned that its not just knowing what blood type you are but knowing your blood type can be very useful and important.

[Lacie Thompson]

I wish we would have done a larger population. I don't think we had enough people to get a strong reply from it. From the article we just read today our own personal didn't match the chart, we didn't have and type B people, but on the chart it said 40 percent of people should have type B blood. I wish we could do a couple more classes to feel a more accurate result. I believe it should be more random than uniformal. It would be nice to try out sometime.

[Kaylee Burris]

Blood typing is really an interesting topic and there is a lot to learn about it. When finding your blood type I would say that poking yourself would be the hardest part :) After you actually get blood on the card then you mix chemicals with it to find out if you are A, B, AB or O or even if your blood is positive or negative. There are many ways to have A or B blood. There is only one way to have O blood: both of your parents have to give you O.
I thought is was crazy that four people out of our class had AB blood and a lot of people had O blood. I thought it was crazy because those are the blood types that are hardest to get. I don't think our data represented Benton very well, i think the amount of people with B blood would really go up. If the amount of B blood went up a little then I think that it might just represent St. Joseph.
I think our sample size was too small, when you have more data it is always somewhat more right. I would say it was random enough because this is a diverse class. I don't think it has to be random to be representative because you can choose a good group to get accurate data. The whole schools data would be truly representative because that is a large body of data.
The data we examined today was interesting to compare to our class data. It was weird to see that there were whole groups of people that just have O blood.
I now understand that blood types vary though people, and that testing your blood(even in class) works because I knew that my blood was A negative and when I tested it that is what it came out too :)

[Taylor Snider]

I really enjoyed doing the blood typing. It was cool to see what blood type i was because i never knew what it was. First we had to prick our finger and put three drops of blood on a blood typing card. We then mixed each drop of blood with three different anti-serums. Anti-serum A, anti-serum B, and anti serum D. All three drops of my blood clotted with the anti-serums which meant i am AB positive.

What stuck out to me was that there weren't any people with type B blood. I figured it would be common like type A was. But i was wrong. I believe we should blood type the whole school to get a better understanding of the blood types at Benton. Same with Saint joe and Missouri.

Our sample size wasn't big enough because we couldn't really compare with other populations. We would need a lot more people. I do think it was random enough and no it doesn't have to be random to be representative. We could have had more Type B blood to make more spread out.

The data we saw today isn't the same as ours. The data used whole populations of different countries all over the world. Ours was just one class in school.

[Morgan Wacker]

I think that the blood typing was fun, even though it took me so long to actually get it done. It was really funny watching some people. But it was really easy and really fast. It didn't hurt at all. The first time I kinda missed though and I freaked out. I hit my nail with the lancet and I thought I got the skin under my nail, but thankfully I didn't.

I was also shocked that there was a large number in the type O blood. I had thought that O wasn't so common, but really you hear that just because you can only get blood from other type O blood people, but you can donate to anyone. It was kind of weird that we had 4 people in the class with type AB blood. They are actually better off with getting blood than any of the other blood types.
I was type O + and after I found that out I asked my parents and my dad was O- and my mom is O+. after I knew that it would make sense that I really am a type O

[Ryne Relford]

I really enjoyed doing the blood typing, although poking myself in the finger was harder than I thought. I haven't done much with blood types in my years of schooling so it was really exciting to mix the chemicals with my blood to find out that I was O+.

I was really surprised when are classed had a percentage of 20 for AB, because in the article we looked at in class today only 4 % were AB for whites in the United States. Also we had 0 % for B's which was weird because in that same article 11 % of white people in the United States are B. Our other numbers were pretty close though, with A being 5 % away from the article's numbers and A also being 5 % from the article's numbers. Another thing that could throw our numbers off, is the fact that we only did one class in Benton High School while the Article is showing blood types of our whole nation. So I believe for our numbers to be accurate we would have to get an average for Missouri and compare to those. Also I believe our numbers could be a bit deceiving because we only did one class, and to make a respectable comparison I believe we should get the average of at least 100 people.

This kind of test doesn't have to be random to be truly representable, because in other articles of data that we have looked at they have just done specific ethnic groups to get that specific groups numbers. It just takes a larger sample size to get credible numbers. But if someone wanted to look at the stats for a whole state or nation then yes it would have to be random.

[kristen sheehan]

Well I wan't here for the blood typing activity but I do know that it is a very important thing. I know that my grandpa had lukemia and had to have blood transfusions quite frequently. So yes this is a very important thing to do.

From the class data I see that there are more people with type O blood than any other. I know that O is the universal blood type. Meaning that that a person with this blood can give blood to anyone with any blood type.

I wish that I would have been there for the activity because I would like to know my blood type. Oh, and in class we were given a sheet with different types of people, like different ethnic backgrounds, and they were trying to see if blood type was realated to race. Personally, I don't really know the answer to that question.

But I'm sure I will find out! :-)

[Tori Scott]

I thought it was pretty cool to be able to do our blood typing in class. I wasn't exactly suprised but our numbers to be honest. O is pretty common so that wasnt a big shock. However i was a bit suprised that we had so many A blood type. The cool thing about it all was that it was so simple to find out what type you are.

Before we began blood typing we had those papers where we were suppose to guess who we thought we would be closes to when it came to our blood types. I had guessed that we would be close to the Indians. From what it looked like we were relatively close. I made my guess soley on an historical point of view. I thought that the indians were here first and so when pilgrims came over and we began working and co-existing that the blood types would be fairly close because over time they began to make little indian american kids :).

A question i was wondering about it all was if your blood type really can have something to do with your race. So say your of the African American race is there a more common blood type among them? I do see where this could be a problem, some extreme racist people could be upst about having the same type of blood as the race they have hate towards. Personaly i think that is one of the most idiotic things ever but im sure there are plenty of people who would be this way.

I was pretty stoked about being o positve. First off because my favorite book character is haha. On a serious note though i think its pretty cool to be a universal donor. So any one could use your blood and be okay with it. It does suck a bit though to only be able to recieve type o but im sure there is and abundance of it.

[Rachel Huntsman]

I found it really odd that we didn't have anybody with type B blood. On average it appeared that AB was least common, with B being slightly more common than AB in the average population. With our class we had no B, but really quite a few AB in comparison to our percentages of A and O. I really expected the class to have a majority O and then have A come in second, so that wasn't unexpected.

I don't think our class was big enough to do a total representation of Benton, because for nationalities/ethnicity we as a class were not diverse at all. Therefore we would definitely not be an accurate representation of Saint Joseph or Missouri. If we had more diversity in our class I think our size would have been large enough. Size wouldn't really matter as long as the diversity of the group were proportioned similarly to the larger group it is being compared to. Again, I think the "correct randomness" would come with having diversity in the test group, and not necessarily the size of the group.

Our class's results in comparison to those of our readings were very different. O is most common, with A in second, B in third and AB in last. This seems to be the most common for a great deal of groups, however our order was O, A, AB and B. That doesn't seem like a big deal, but the percentages were what was odd. AB's percentage wasn't far from A's, and B's was at 0. O and A were not unexpected.

I now know a lot more about how blood types are determined, or how a child receives their blood type from their parents. I still find it odd, though, that the recessive blood type O is most dominant in a many groups. I understand how it has most likely become gradually dominant. Ao and Bo must be very common blood types for O to have become common.

[Erin McAndrews]

I was really surprised at how easy it was to figure out your blood type. I was expecting it to take a lot longer than just five minutes.

I thought it was really strange that 20% of our classroom was AB and not one person in the classroom was B. Going into this lab, I figured O would have the highest percentage with A close behind and then after A there would be a big drop off. But, in reality, AB wasn't that far behind A.

I really don't think it represented Benton as a whole very well because everyone in our class is very similar. It also didn't represent St. Joseph, Missouri very well either. In order to represent Benton and St. Joseph better, I think it needs to be more random and with more participants. With only around 20 students doing the lab, there really wasn't enough people to make our results represent Benton. I think this becuase there were so many AB's. In order for it to be truly representive there should be atleast 50 or 60 participants.

[Korby Trautman]

I liked doing the blood testing. It's one thing to do an experiment on some lab prepared equipment, but to do tests on yourself, It's a whole new feel on constructive data. I think we could have done better by increasing our data intake, maybe to the whole top floor, or just all juniors and seniors. We would also have collected more accurate data by getting blood types from multiple races in our school. this would have given us more results in each type.

With our results, i don't think it truly reflected the data which we read about. we had data that almost reflected no ethnic groups. If we had more participants with different backgrounds, are results would have been better.