物理学知识原理向遗传学教学渗透的实践与思考

遗传学是生物学科的核心课程,在生物学的教学与研究中具有十分重要的作用,而遗传学的知识原理与物理学的知识原理具有一定的相似性。由于遗传学教学内容较为抽象,加之学生在中学阶段所学的遗传学基础知识相对薄弱,导致部分学生缺乏学习兴趣。如何采用“渗透式”的教学方法将学生深厚的物理学知识原理引入遗传学课堂是一个值得探讨的问题。近年来,笔者应用物理学的知识原理,将部分物理知识与遗传知识进行类比教学和渗透式教学,提升学生对遗传学知识的认识层次和理解水平,进而提高学生的学习能力和创新思维能力。     

Make biology relevant again! Pre-service teachers’ views on the relevance of biology education

ABSTRACT

Biology education should be relevant to young students so that they can become interested in biology and understand biological topics in their everyday and vocational lives. We conducted interviews and collected mind maps to examine Finnish pre-service biology teachers’ (N = 16) views on the relevance of biology education. Furthermore, we analysed Finnish secondary school biology curricula, which were compared with the pre-service teachers’ answers. We classified the views on relevance into nine main categories using grounded theory as the methodological frame of reference. Pre-service teachers emphasised the relevance of biology to the student’s own life, whereas scientific practices and the nature of science were expressed in secondary school curricula more often. Novice pre-service teachers put more value on general knowledge, while more experienced pre-service teachers were more likely to mention sustainable futures and societal aspects in their reasoning. Based on the results, we identified two stages in the development of the views. This study suggests that pedagogical studies, teaching experience and teacher training have an impact on the pre-service teachers’ views about the relevance of biology education. Moreover, we could find differences between curricula and pre-service teachers’ views, especially regarding scientific practices and the role of the nature of science in biology education.     

Chilean Pre-service and In-service Teachers and Undergraduate Students’ Understandings of Evolutionary Theory

Despite the importance of the theory of evolution to scientific knowledge, a number of misconceptions continue to be found among teachers and undergraduate students. The aim of the present study was to describe and characterise knowledge about evolution among 120 freshman undergraduate students of two natural sciences programmes (environmental biology and veterinary medicine), 80 pre-service science teachers (elementary and biology) and 45 in-service teachers (elementary and biology high school) in Santiago, Chile. The research was carried out based on an eight-question questionnaire about evolution acceptance and understanding. The instrument included seven Likert-scale questions and one open-ended question. An analysis of the data revealed that more than 70% of teachers (pre-service and in-service) and undergraduate students recognised the theory of evolution as established scientific knowledge. When participants discussed the mechanism of evolution in the open-ended question, the most prevalent responses from students and teachers (33%) explained evolution as need-driven changes for survival purposes. Only 13% of the responses could be considered Darwinian, and 10% of responses included more than one view of evolution. The Darwinian responses generally included three important aspects: variation, inheritance and differential reproduction. The implications for biology teacher education are also discussed in this study.     

Bio-monitoring of ozone by young students

The inquiry-based approach is an important component of secondary school biology curricula. However, we found that common Australian texts included little coverage of controlled experimentation in ecological practical work. The logistical and ethical difficulties in designing suitable ecological practicals may be a factor in these observations, as well as a perception that investigations of the complex interrelationships in ecology require scientific approaches other than experimentation. We argue that because controlled experiments are used extensively by professional ecologists to solve both theoretical and applied problems, experimentation should be a key component of secondary school ecology curricula. We suggest five teaching principles to guide secondary school biology teachers in providing a more realistic view of the possibilities and limitations of ecological experimentation. We also review ways in which computer simulations and microcosm experiments can be used to overcome logistical and ethical problems and allow students to design and implement ecological experiments. Whether based in the classroom or the field, the use of experimental approaches in secondary school ecology curricula illustrates ecological concepts, reinforces principles of experimental design and highlights the value of the inquiry-based approach in biological education.     

The ability of A-level students to name plants

he ability of A level students to recognise and name common wild flowers was shown to be very poor. Traineeteachers performed little better and nearly a third of the practising A-level biology teachers tested were able toname only three or fewer wild flowers.

Although opportunities exist at primary level for children to learn about the environment, most enter sec-ondary school with a poor knowledge of the organisms around them, particularly plants. At secondary level thedecrease in the importance of whole organism biology in the curriculum, declining opportunities for fieldworkand the concentration of A-level fieldwork on techniques and course assessment allow little time for training inidentification skills. Many A-level students feel that being able to recognise and name organisms is not important. In teaching students to be responsible citizens and to care about their environment, a knowledge of atleast the common organisms around them is vital.Initiatives are needed to engage the interest of primaryschool children and to provide more opportunities for fieldwork at secondary level, including time to teach students to recognise organisms. Training for teachers would be valuable and the role of organisations outside formal education in educating the wider public is also recognised.     

Genethics: project accountability via evaluation of teacher and student growth.

Accountability through demonstrated learning is increasingly being demanded by agencies funding science education projects. For example, the National Science Foundation requires evidence of the educational impact of programs designed to increase the scientific understanding and competencies of teachers and their students. The purpose of this paper is to share our human genetics educational experiences and accountability model with colleagues interested in serving the genetics educational needs of in-service secondary school science teachers and their students. Our accountability model is facilitated through (1) identifying the educational needs of the population of teachers to be served, (2) articulating goals and measurable objectives to meet these needs, and (3) then designing and implementing pretest/posttest questions to measure whether the objectives have been achieved. Comparison of entry and exit levels of performance on a 50-item test showed that teacher-participants learned a statistically significant amount of genetics content in our NSF-funded workshops. Teachers, in turn, administered a 25-item pretest/posttest to their secondary school students, and collective data from 121 classrooms across the United States revealed statistically significant increases in student knowledge of genetics content. Methods describing our attempts to evaluate teachers' use of pedagogical techniques and bioethical decision-making skills are briefly addressed.     

A first attempt to bring computational biology into advanced high school biology classrooms

Computer science has become ubiquitous in many areas of biological research, yet most high school and even college students are unaware of this. As a result, many college biology majors graduate without adequate computational skills for contemporary fields of biology. The absence of a computational element in secondary school biology classrooms is of growing concern to the computational biology community and biology teachers who would like to acquaint their students with updated approaches in the discipline. We present a first attempt to correct this absence by introducing a computational biology element to teach genetic evolution into advanced biology classes in two local high schools. Our primary goal was to show students how computation is used in biology and why a basic understanding of computation is necessary for research in many fields of biology. This curriculum is intended to be taught by a computational biologist who has worked with a high school advanced biology teacher to adapt the unit for his/her classroom, but a motivated high school teacher comfortable with mathematics and computing may be able to teach this alone. In this paper, we present our curriculum, which takes into consideration the constraints of the required curriculum, and discuss our experiences teaching it. We describe the successes and challenges we encountered while bringing this unit to high school students, discuss how we addressed these challenges, and make suggestions for future versions of this curriculum.We believe that our curriculum can be a valuable seed for further development of computational activities aimed at high school biology students. Further, our experiences may be of value to others teaching computational biology at this level. Our curriculum can be obtained at http://ecsite.cs.colorado.edu/?page_id=149#biology or by contacting the authors.     

Connecting ecology to daily life: how students and teachers relate food webs to the food they eat

This study used sociocultural learning theory to better understand how middle and high school environmental science and biology students and pre- and in-service science teachers connect the daily life activity of eating to the food web model learned in school. We sought to understand how student and teacher perceptions of the environment and their experiences influenced their responses to interview questions regarding this topic. Findings, based on transcribed interviews with 54 study participants, indicate that three quarters of teachers and students were unable to connect the food they eat with ecosystem food webs. Even so, many respondents particularly those from elite public schools, did not demonstrate common food web misconceptions identified by other researchers, instead showing a sophisticated understanding of food web interactions. These findings indicate that even though participants were proficient in their school science understanding of food web interactions, they did not readily think about how their everyday out of school activities, like eating, relate to those interactions. This may be representative of a more general disconnect between formal ecology instruction and daily life activities. We provide several recommendations for how this disconnect can be remedied in our classrooms.     

Design and implementation of a genomics field trip program aimed at secondary school students

With the rapid pace of advancements in biological research brought about by the application of computer science and information technology, we believe the time is right for introducing genomics and bioinformatics tools and concepts to secondary school students. Our approach has been to offer a full-day field trip in our research facility where secondary school students carry out experiments at the laboratory bench and on a laptop computer. This experience offers benefits for students, teachers, and field trip instructors. In delivering a wide variety of science outreach and education programs, we have learned that a number of factors contribute to designing a successful experience for secondary school students. First, it is important to engage students with authentic and fun activities that are linked to real-world applications and/or research questions. Second, connecting with a local high school teacher to pilot programs and linking to curricula taught in secondary schools will enrich the field trip experience. Whether or not programs are linked directly to local teachers, it is important to be flexible and build in mechanisms for collecting feedback in field trip programs. Finally, graduate students can be very powerful mentors for students and should be encouraged to share their enthusiasm for science and to talk about career paths. Our experiences suggest a real need for effective science outreach programs at the secondary school level and that genomics and bioinformatics are ideal areas to explore.     

《遗传学》教学中若干问题的数学解析Ⅱ

遗传学教学过程中会发现一系列启发性的问题,涉及孟德尔遗传、数量遗传、群体遗传和人类遗传等领域,这些问题对许多学生来讲有趣且有一定难度。收集了若干启发性问题,包括自交后代各种表型可能出现的频率、多次回交的目的、显性性状是否在群体中占有更大的比例、为什么母亲的年龄与子女的正常与否有很大的关系、遗传力的估算方法等,并用数学方法一一进行剖析,以供相关同学和同行借鉴和思考。     

The Mathematical Basis of Mendelian Genetics

In a climate where increasing numbers of students are encouraged to pursue post-secondary education, the level of preparedness students have for college-level coursework is not far from the minds of all educators, especially high school teachers. Specifically within the biological sciences, introductory biology classes often serve as the gatekeeper or a pre-requisite for subsequent coursework in those fields and pre-professional programmes (eg pre-medicine or pre-veterinarian). Thus, how helpful high school science and mathematics experiences are in preparing students for their introductory biology classes is important and relevant for teachers, science educators and policy makers alike. This quantitative study looked at the association between students' high school science and mathematics experiences with introductory college biology performance. Using a nationally representative sample of US students (n?=?2667) enrolled in 33 introductory college biology courses, a multi-level statistical model was developed to analyse the association between high school educational experiences and the final course grade in introductory biology courses. Advanced high school science and mathematics coursework, an emphasis on a deep conceptual understanding of biology concepts and a prior knowledge of concepts addressed in well-structured laboratory investigations are all positively associated with students' achievement in introductory college biology.     

The interface between epidemiology and population genetics

Modern biology increasingly integrates disparate disciplines. Here, Steve Paterson and Mark Viney examine the interface between epidemiology and population genetics. They argue that infection and inheritance can be considered as analogous processes, and that epidemiology and population genetics share many common features. They consider the potential for existing population genetic theory to dissect epidemiological patterns in field studies and they consider other relationships between genetics and epidemiology that provide a research challenge for the future.     

Biology student teachers’ dialogic talk in inquiry-based instruction

ABSTRACT

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 develop their teachership in biology education. In this qualitative case study, the dialogic talk of biology student teachers (N = 6) was studied in the context of inquiry-based lessons in lower secondary school. The student teachers’ lessons were video and audio recorded and the data was analyzed using content analysis. The student teachers used dialogic talk in their inquiry-based instruction only occasionally, mainly in the examination and the conclusion stages. During the introduction stage, dialogic talk was less used and it was mainly explaining and instructing the content. In the examination stage, student teachers also guided students and stated facts. During the conclusion stage, student teachers mainly explained and also evaluated students’ statements. The lesson’s topics and methods used in inquiry-based learning may enable the dialogic talk of student teacher to some extent. However, teacher education should focus more on scaffolding student teachers’ talk with their students in all kinds of inquiry approaches.     

To Believe or not to Believe? A College Student Explores Knowledge and Attitudes about Evolution at her School

After interviewing 17 students and four teachers at Drew University, a college of 1,400 undergraduates which I attend, I found that whereas most express a belief in evolution, many display a hesitancy to embrace the theory entirely. Instead, most students choose to believe only in evolution within lineages and not on a larger scale, specifically in the creation of new species. Teachers at the school explain that their experiences at Drew are similar to those they have experienced at other colleges they have taught at and discuss their methods for introducing the subject in the classroom and the significance of learning evolution. Furthermore, whereas it is easy for students to avoid taking biology classes that would expose them to the theory, I discuss what students look for when taking biology courses and preconceptions teachers must help students overcome when exposing them to evolution.     

A case for project based learning to enact semantic waves: towards cumulative knowledge building

ABSTRACT

First-year undergraduate curricula and their delivery should assist students in the transition from previous learning experiences to learning in higher education. However, the so-called articulation gap or discontinuity between secondary and higher education has been identified as a key structural curriculum problem for first-year success in South Africa and abroad. Valuable insights into this problem came from a recent study that drew on Legitimation Code Theory (LCT). Findings revealed an unexpectedly wide gap between the high school and the university biology curricula. The high school biology curriculum displays minimal movement between context-dependent, simpler meaning and relatively decontextualized, condensed meaning common in first-year biology. LCT Semantics was also found to be a valuable tool for restructuring curricula and pedagogy to intentionally enact semantic movement and thereby a more gradual transition for students from high school to university. This paper reports on an integrative first-year biology project aimed intentionally at taking students’ concept knowledge through a wide contextual range, and repeatedly between less and more complex meaning. I reflect on how the project design steers students towards creating semantic movement during their presentations, thereby contributing to cumulative knowledge building and a more gradual transition towards first-year epistemological access.     

重视经典遗传学知识体系构建和学生自学能力的培养

遗传学知识的不断更新以及信息量快速增加, 这对遗传学的本科教学是一种挑战。作者认为, 在本科教学中应加强学生遗传学知识体系的构建, 即“把书读薄”, 同时注重提高学生主动学习的能力, 即“把书读厚”, 以提高学生自学能力和逻辑思维能力, 为培养具有一定竞争力的复合型人才奠定坚实的基础。     

Out-of-school experience categories influencing interest in biology of secondary school students by gender: exploration on an Abu Dhabi sample

This study employed the international Relevance of Science Education questionnaire to survey the interest in biology and the out-of-school experiences of Abu Dhabi secondary school students (median age 17, mean age 17.53 and mode age of 16) in the third semester of 2014. It included 3100 participants. An exploratory factor analysis was used to categorise the items for both interest in biology and out-of-school experience. Ten interest in biology and 12 out-of-school experience factors were extracted. The summated means for each factor indicated that ‘health and fitness’ and ‘disease control’ enjoyed highest interests among students. For out-of-school experiences, the two factors of ‘digital applications’ and ‘medical treatment’ received the highest scores. Multivariate analysis of variance revealed that all factors for both interest in biology and out-of-school experience exhibited significant differences between boys and girls. More girls than boys were interested in disease control, reproduction (human biology), alternative science, health and fitness, zoology, and applied cosmetic biology. No significant differences were observed for the remaining five other categories. Furthermore, analysis of variance revealed significant differences between boys and girls with regard to individual items comprising each of the factors. The highest correlations were between the two factors of out-of-school experiences of ‘the natural world’ and ‘learning through observation’ and the interest in biology factor related to ‘plant and animal farming and agriculture’. Results suggested that more emphasis must be placed on students’ out-of-school experience and their engagement in informal learning in contextual outdoor environments to enhance their interest in learning more about biology and the living environment in general.     

How to use Hydra as a model system to teach biology in the classroom

As scientists it is our duty to fight against obscurantism and loss of rational thinking if we want politicians and citizens to freely make the most intelligent choices for the future generations. With that aim, the scientific education and training of young students is an obvious and urgent necessity. We claim here that Hydra provides a highly versatile but cheap model organism to study biology at any age. Teachers of biology have the unenviable task of motivating young people, who with many other motivations that are quite valid, nevertheless must be guided along a path congruent with a 'syllabus' or a 'curriculum'. The biology of Hydra spans the history of biology as an experimental science from Trembley's first manipulations designed to determine if the green polyp he found was plant or animal to the dissection of the molecular cascades underpinning, regeneration, wound healing, stemness, aging and cancer. It is described here in terms designed to elicit its wider use in classrooms. Simple lessons are outlined in sufficient detail for beginners to enter the world of 'Hydra biology'. Protocols start with the simplest observations to experiments that have been pretested with students in the USA and in Europe. The lessons are practical and can be used to bring 'life', but also rational thinking into the study of life for the teachers of students from elementary school through early university.     

Getting a head start: the importance of personal genetics education in high schools

With advances in sequencing technology, widespread and affordable genome sequencing will soon be a reality. However, studies suggest that "genetic literacy" of the general public is inadequate to prepare our society for this unprecedented access to our genetic information. As the current generation of high school students will come of age in an era when personal genetic information is increasingly utilized in health care, it is of vital importance to ensure these students understand the genetic concepts necessary to make informed medical decisions. These concepts include not only basic scientific knowledge, but also considerations of the ethical, legal, and social issues that will arise in the age of personal genomics. In this article, we review the current state of genetics education, highlight issues that we believe need to be addressed in a comprehensive genetics education curriculum, and describe our education efforts at the Harvard Medical School-based Personal Genetics Education Project.