Biology learning, especially the topic of plant physiology, requires Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS). This ability needs to be improved with HOTS based teaching materials. The teaching materials, however, have not been developed, especially those in plant physiology topic. Students' HOTS in biology learning still requires an improvement as…

Plant Physiology and Ecophysiology (PPE) is a subject taught in the biology degree. One of the skills that students must acquire is "the ability to solve PPE problems." Acquiring this competence requires a precise working methodology, a high degree of presence, and teamwork between teachers and students. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic…

Knowledge about plant nutrition and photosynthesis is key to the scientific literacy of citizens. However, numerous studies have shown the existence of about 50 alternative ideas related to this content. In this work, carried out based on a reflection-action process, two studies based on the ideas of our 12-18 year old students are presented, as…

COVID-19 outbreak brought about many challenges including the shifting of university assessments to conduct in online mode. This research study tries to explore the impact of newly designed online formative assessments on students' learning, in a Plant Physiology course. The designing of assessments were carried out focusing on constructive…

This article describes a ten week long laboratory exercise designed for undergraduate students aimed at enhancing their understanding of physiological and biochemical responses of plants under dehydration stress. Hypothesis was built around previous reports which suggested that exogenous application of certain elicitors leads to transient…

The current study aimed to assess the representation skills of biology students with varying degrees of academic ability when they learn using the Learning Cycle Multiple Representation (LCMR) model. The study employed a quasi-experimental design with a pretest-posttest control group, at March to August 2020 at Universitas Pendidikan Mandalika and…

University students often struggle to understand the role of water in plant cells. In particular, osmosis and plasmolysis appear to be challenging topics. This study attempted to identify student difficulties (including misconceptions) concerning osmosis and plasmolysis and examined to what extent the difficulties could be revised during a plant…

This study examines the subjects and concepts in biology perceived to be difficult to learn and teach by 759 pre-service biology teachers registered in the pedagogical formation program at Uludag University Faculty of Education in the academic year of 2005-2016, as well as the associations that word "biology" first calls to their mind.…

This study aimed to develop a learning progression (LP) for botanical literacy and assess the impact of a garden-based education course on Thai pre-service science teachers (n = 49). The inquiry- and community-based education course was taught over a 15-week period. To measure botanical literacy, a 50-item multiple-choice test was employed. A…

Analogical reasoning is an important type of cognition often used by experts across domains. Little research, however, has investigated how generating analogies can support college students' self-regulated learning (SRL) of biology. This study therefore evaluated a contextualized cognitive learning strategy intervention designed to teach students…

One of the successes of learning is the formation of thinking skills and understanding. Therefore in this study the formative assessment is implemented through Understanding by Design (UbD). The research objective is to find out the formation of understanding and to analyze the correlation between formative assessments and UbD. The study used…

The plant kingdom can be learned more successfully if tasks involve direct contact with elements of the plant world and students have the possibility of working cooperatively in small groups within the secondary school classroom. This paper analyses student understanding of the general and floral physiology of angiosperms within a…

Purpose: The present paper aims to examine the concept of "plant blindness" in the context of current sustainability debates. "Plant blindness" was the term introduced in 1999 by the botanists and educators James H Wandersee and Elisabeth E Schussler to describe what they saw as a pervasive insensitivity to the green…

The Physiology Core Concept of flow down gradients is a major concept in physiology, as pressure gradients are the key driving force for the bulk flow of fluids in biology. However, students struggle to understand that this principle is foundational to the mechanisms governing bulk flow across diverse physiological systems (e.g., blood flow,…

One of the overlapping curriculum designs indicates the mismatch of teaching materials with the cognitive level process and student development, impacting the unstructured qualification of mastery of the material. On the other hand, the breadth and depth of teaching materials in the curriculum must be following students' mental development and…