School-based citizen-science can be a powerful means to engage youth in environmental education, yet developing robust science curricula around citizen-science activities is tremendously challenging. Prior research provides limited examples and very little guidance for curriculum designers. To support the designers of school-based citizen-science…

John Dewey's aesthetics subverts and transcends traditional aesthetics. He applied his empiricism philosophy into the field of aesthetics and re-established the significance of aesthetic experience. Aesthetic experience comes from daily experience; hence it is not fundamentally different from students' biological learning experience. Based on…

Case studies of two biology teachers, Cathy and David, from the same minority-majority, urban U.S. high school, provide insights into their instructional practices while they engaged in long-term professional development (PD). Findings suggest why science teachers engaged with PD may, or may not, adopt more adaptive pedagogical approaches in the…

Science popularisation festivals attract more and more people every year, showing that there is a need to satisfy public curiosity. Such events are good occasions to disseminate knowledge to a large audience. The results of scientific research bring advances for mankind. Since research mostly depends on public funds, it is important to gain…

Though argumentation is a key component of scientific knowledge construction practices, it rarely occurs in classrooms worldwide. Moreover, related literature in the context of genetics and evolution learning primarily addresses them separately. In contrast, this paper is part of broader research on genetics and evolution instruction taught…

Inquiry-based learning has generally accepted by scholars as a most effective teaching approach in biology education. The talk during inquiry-based teaching needs to be practiced. There is less evidence how student teachers talk with students during their inquiry-based biology instruction. This knowledge is needed in supporting student teachers to…

In this paper we discuss an activity through which students learn basic concepts in genetics by taking part in a police investigation game. The activity, which we have called Recal, immerses students in a scientific-based scenario in which they play a role of a scientific assessor. Players have to develop and use scientific reasoning and…

This paper examines the feasibility of using historical case studies to contextualise the learning of the nature of science and technology in a biology lesson. Through exploring the historical development of vaccine technology, students were expected to understand the complexity of the relationships between technology and science beyond the…

The choice of which language strategies to use in schools in Africa is the subject of much debate. In the Life Sciences, cultural issues associated with the use of biological terminology add to this debate. In our study, we examined the language choices made by Grade 7 Natural Sciences teachers in South Africa during their teaching of human…

Changes in the learning process during the COVID-19 pandemic require quick adaptation from teachers and students to immediately achieve learning goals. However, it remains ineffective, resulting in a threat of learning loss. This condition can be overcome if students have confidence in their abilities or self-efficacy. It is important to do an…

teachers, particularly in providing these students the core competencies to be more globally competitive and functionality literate in science and in biological disciplines in particular. The purpose of this study was to determine the least mastered competencies of 10 graders in different biology competencies they learned from grade 7 to grade 10.…

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…

We describe a case study of an in-service professional development project with four experienced biology teachers in two upper secondary schools. The objective was to better understand the role of laboratory work (labwork) in science education with a special emphasis on assessment. Research questions include the following: 1. What does the teacher…

In recent years, the science teaching community and curriculum developers have emphasised the importance of teaching inquiry and teaching science as inquiry. One way of developing learners' skills for planning and carrying out scientific research is by allowing them to perform independent research, guided by a teacher. It was recently discovered…