National calls to improve science education include focusing on scientific practices coupled with learning disciplinary core ideas. Among the practices is constructing explanations. In the field of cellular and molecular biology, explanations typically include a mechanism and can be used to make predictions about phenomena. In this work, we…

This study reports on the theoretical- and empirical-based design and evaluation of cell membrane biology learning activities within the Model of Educational Reconstruction and experiential realism. First, we designed analogy-based learning activities by considering students' and scientists' conceptions as described in the literature. Secondly, we…

Ecosystem services (ES) are the benefits people obtain from nature contributing to our well-being. Although this concept has high didactic potential, its presence in education literature is scarce. This article presents the ES framework as a new teaching principle that, taught together with the biodiversity concept, may help students develop…

It is a controversial issue in education that students perform dissection experiments. Different opinions have been noted in studies on this subject, and various applications are recommended according to education levels. This case study aimed to determine pre-service science teachers' views of hands-on dissection and virtual dissection. The study…

Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) have been described as a mechanism to allow more undergraduates to engage in research experiences. To understand whether CUREs are viable to scale-up undergraduate access to research experiences, it is essential to carefully evaluate whether CUREs promote comparable self-reported outcomes for…

Even though genetics has been implemented in biology curricula at secondary schools for decades, reports repeatedly indicate that students still hold various misconceptions about this topic. To successfully target these misconceptions, we need to know their nature and origin. We aimed to investigate these properties in the Czech educational system…

The article presents the results of an exploratory-qualitative study about children´s conceptions of ecology in relation to media messages. The objective of the study has been to identify the role of ecologism and environmental campaigns on ecology conceptions of 105 6th grade children, age 10-12, from an educational institution in Bogota,…

Education reform calls for portraying science as a process of inquiry and argumentation grounded in the epistemic traditions of a domain. While experimentation is a core scientific investigation strategy, diverse approaches are represented across different domains of science. Ecosystem scientists use experiments as a core part of their…

This study investigated how pre-service biology teachers perceived the concepts of 'system' -- as the basic component of the systems thinking approach -- and 'biological system' specific to biology. The most important characteristics of a system appear as elements, interactions, interconnections, hierarchy, purpose and forming a whole. The data of…

The historical dimension of biology attests to the various conceptions of living organisms that have governed the construction of scientific knowledge over time, some of which still persist today. The present study aimed to identify and characterise the various conceptions of living organisms held by future teachers and biologists and the…

Biology education aims to inspire interest, curiosity, and understanding about the natural world, foster children's interests and orientations towards supporting and protecting nature, and support children towards biology-related careers (including those involving nature and animals). However, it remains less clear how these views might associate…

We developed an analog board game, "BioRacer" to further student learning in the field of public health biology and assessed its impact on learning by conducting a mixed method study. The purpose was to ascertain whether and how gaming could be a valuable learning experience for students in a lower year level undergraduate course in…

The present study explored the impacts of a contextualised outdoor science curriculum on "what" and "how" elementary students learn when immersed in the local contexts in which natural phenomena occur. We conducted 63 individual interviews with fifth- and sixth-graders (between 10 and 12 years old) living in the inner city of…

The COVID-19 pandemic caused severe disruption to education in the UK in 2020, with most of the school teaching moving online and national school examinations being cancelled. This was particularly disruptive for those taking end of school examinations in preparation for higher education. Biological science courses require students to absorb a lot…

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…