Teaching scientific writing in biology classes is challenging for both students and instructors. This article offers and reviews several useful "toolkit" items that improve student writing. These include sentence and paper-length templates, funnelling and compartmentalisation, and preparing compendiums of corrections. In addition,…

As education in England emerges from a major curriculum review (DfE 2013), the next few years will see significant changes in what is taught in schools and how this is assessed. As a core subject, under the current proposals, all students, from the beginning of primary school until age 16, will study science in some detail. Biology is an exciting,…

School science laboratory classes and hands-on public engagement activities share many common aims and objectives in terms of science learning and literacy. This article describes the development and evaluation of a microbiology public engagement activity, "The Good, the Bad and the Algae", from a school laboratory activity. The school…

The "Inclusion of Nature in Self" scale (INS) was applied to monitor shifts in reported connectedness with nature within the framework of a school-based environmental education programme. One hundred and twenty-three German students (sixth-graders) participated in a one-day module, which included hands-on indoor (classroom) and outdoor (nearby…

Different genres of scientific articles have begun to diffuse into science curricula. Among them, adapted primary literature (APL) retains the characteristics of scientific research articles, while adapting their contents to the knowledge level of students in the 11th to 12th grades. We present three models for the teaching and learning of the…

Concept mapping is discussed as a tool for the visualisation of knowledge structures that can be exploited within biological education. Application of this tool makes it possible to relate the structure of the curriculum to the structure of the discipline, in order to support the development of robust student knowledge structures in ways that…

The "Green Classroom" in Ulm is an experiential learning forum outside school. Its educational concept is based on experimental learning and is geared towards expanding biological knowledge and developing environmental attitudes regarding preservation and utilisation of nature. We assessed the environmental attitude of 92 students before and after…

The microbial growth curve is widely studied within microbiology classes and bacteria are usually the microbial model used. Here, we describe a novel laboratory protocol involving flow cytometry to assess the growth dynamics of the unicellular microalgae "Isochrysis galbana." The algal model represents an appropriate alternative to bacteria…

In this paper, the authors analyse the conceptual contents related to plant nutrition in the widely-used school texts of six Spanish publishers. An analysis dossier was elaborated based on the epistemological and pedagogical study of this subject. The publishers deal with the issue of plant nutrition at three different levels (multicellular,…

This paper investigates the issue of how emotions such as disgust influence students' self-efficacy belief in terms of mastering a dissection task and also how these affect their interest in the biology of the heart. Following models of intrinsic motivation and the development of motivation, we expected disgust to negatively impact on students'…

Schools have been identified as one of the appropriate settings for addiction prevention since this is the place where pupils may come into contact with drugs for the first time and experiment with them, with the possibility of becoming addicted. To be effective, school-based drug education must be firmly based on knowledge of oneself and…

For many years there has been a growing concern, particularly among researchers in biology education, about the extent to which research findings from one discipline (most usually physics education) can be applied directly to other disciplines (particularly biology education). This paper explores the issue through the use of one particular…

The micronucleus test is widely employed in environmental health research. It can also be an excellent tool for learning important concepts in environmental health. In this article we present an inquiry-based laboratory exercise where students explore several theoretical and practical aspects of environmental mutagenesis employing the micronucleus…

This study examined what worldviews are present among Dutch students and teachers and how the students cope with scientific knowledge acquired in the biology classroom. Furthermore, we investigated what learning and teaching strategies teachers adopt when they teach about evolution and worldviews. For this survey, 10 schools for higher general…

Many studies have shown that students' understanding of evolution is low and some sort of historical approach would be necessary in order to allow students to understand the theory of evolution. It is common to present Mendelian genetics to high school students prior to Biological Evolution, having in mind historical and epistemological…