This paper looks at the drawings of a sample of 118 children aged between 4 and 7 years old on the topic of plant life and relates the content to their knowledge of the concept of living things. The research project uses two types of tests: a task to analyse the level of understanding of the concept of living things and a free drawing activity.…

Diagrams feature prominently in science education, and there has been an increase in research focusing on students' use of them in knowledge construction. This paper reports on an investigation into first year university students' perceptions of scale and size at the cellular level. It was found that many students appeared to tacitly…

Plants are characterised by a great diversity of easily observed features such as colours or shape, but children show low interest in learning about them. Here, we integrated modern theory of adaptive memory and evolutionary views of the function of fruit colouration on children's retention of information. Survival-relevant (fruit toxicity)…

Evolution is a fundamental, organising concept in biology, yet there is widespread resistance to evolution among US students and there are rising creationist challenges in Europe. Resistance to evolution is linked to lack of understanding of the age of the Earth. An understanding of deep time is thus essential for effective biology education.…

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,…

The "Green Classroom" in the Botanical Garden of the University of Ulm is a learning forum outdoor school that is used by about 2500 school students annually. Its educational concept is based on experiential learning and is geared towards expanding students' biological knowledge and developing positive attitudes towards small…

Teachers' conceptions of teaching, including assessment practices, are substantial in directing student learning. Our article refers to assessment at tertiary level biological education. We studied life science (more specifically microbiology-related) teachers' assessment discourse describing how they understood assessment as part of…

Informed understandings of nature of science and scientific inquiry are generally accepted goals of biology education. This article points out central features of scientific inquiry with relation to biology and the nature of science in general terms and focuses on the relationship of students' inquiry skills in biology and their beliefs on…

The concept of natural selection serves as a foundation for understanding diverse biological concepts and has broad applicability to other domains. However, we know little about students' abilities to transfer (i.e. apply to a new context or use generatively) this concept and the relation between students' conceptual understanding and…

This semi-experimental study was conducted with twenty-seven midwifery students who were randomly allocated to either case-based instruction or lecture-based instruction groups. The selected subjects -- foetal intrapartum assessment, foetal antepartum assessment, ABO and Rh blood group system mismatch -- were presented in four ninety-minute…

The purpose of the study is to find out what a group of seven-year-old South African children understand of their internal anatomy. The research is based on the premise that young children obtain most of their science knowledge through personal experience. Drawings are used to determine the level of young children's knowledge of systems and…

Promoting student understanding of ecosystem processes is critical to biological education. Yet, teaching complex life systems can be difficult because systems are dynamic and often behave in a non-linear manner. In this paper, we discuss assessment results from a middle school classroom intervention in which a conceptual representation framework…

Introducing research in undergraduate biology studies may contribute to creating research vocations and generate the idea that science may influence all aspects of common life. However, laboratory practices are too often disconnected from current investigations and rarely address real-life questions that are really interesting for students.…

Genomics and proteomics projects have produced a huge amount of raw biological data including DNA and protein sequences. Although these data have been stored in data banks, their evaluation is strictly dependent on bioinformatics tools. These tools have been developed by multidisciplinary experts for fast and robust analysis of biological data.…

This biology investigation on "Pristipomoides filamentosus" larval development, survival, and aquaculture research was developed with three educational objectives: to provide high school students with (1) a scientific background on the biology and science of fisheries as well as overfishing, its consequences, and possible mitigations;…