Using Team-Based Learning to Teach Grade 7 Biology: Student satisfaction and improved performance

Team-based learning (TBL) is an innovative form of collaborative learning. The purpose of this study was to evaluate TBL’s effect on the performance and satisfaction of grade 7 students in biology in a private school in Lebanon, as well as teachers’ willingness to implement this new methodology. An exploratory study was performed whereby two biology units were taught to two groups of students using either TBL (60 students) or traditional lecture-based instruction (30 students). Later, a summative test was administered to evaluate students’ performance. Students’ attitudes were evaluated using a questionnaire and teachers’ classroom observations. Finally, science teachers’ willingness to try TBL in their classes was assessed using a questionnaire (14 teachers). Results showed that underachievers taught according to TBL did better than underachievers taught with the lecture-based approach. The majority of students enjoyed TBL and found it useful and fun. Finally, science teachers agreed that TBL is a good alternative to the traditional lecture-based method.     

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.     

High-school students in university research labs? Implementing an outreach model based on the ‘science as inquiry’ approach

In this study we designed, implemented, and evaluated an outreach programme for high-school biology students rooted in the ‘science as inquiry’ approach. Accordingly, students learn about science from experts in the field, as well as through in-class exposure to the history and philosophy of science. Our sample consisted of 11th graders (n?=?497), ages 16–17, attending advanced biology classes. Our goal was to determine whether this programme had a significant effect on students’ understanding of the ‘nature of science’ (NOS) and on their attitudes towards science. Using a controlled pre-post research design, we asked participants to complete a Likert-like questionnaire. Also, we conducted post-programme semi-structured interviews with 35 of the participants. Results show that completion of the programme significantly enhanced participants’ NOS understanding and improved their attitudes towards science. Participants expressed a deep level of NOS understanding and explicitly stated that the field visits to experts’ labs had changed their attitude towards science. We believe that our outreach programme can be adapted for teaching other sciences and for societies worldwide, as long as there is access to university laboratories and researchers willing to interact with young citizens and potential future scientists.     

Assessing students’ performances in decision-making: coping strategies of biology teachers

Decision-making in socioscientific issues (SSI) constitutes a real challenge for both biology teachers and learners. The assessment of students’ performances in SSIs constitutes a problem, especially for biology teachers. The study at hand was conducted in Germany and uses a qualitative approach following the research procedures of grounded theory to focus on teachers’ concepts and, especially, coping strategies in assessment concerning students’ decision-making in SSIs. Semi-structured interviews with six teachers, in combination with video-vignettes, were used for data generation. The results show predominantly defensive strategies when teachers are confronted with the assessment of students’ performances in SSIs. These results and implications for teacher education and teacher training are discussed.     

Teaching biology in the thirties

Ernest J. Holmes, one of the first teachers of ‘biology’ in secondary schools and co-author of a seminal biology textbook, writes a personal account of teaching at a time when ‘biology’ as a school subject was just beginning to become accepted.     

Meaning in Nature: Organic Manufacture?

The paper examines Marcello Barbieri’s (2007) Introduction to Biosemiotics. Highlighting debate within the biosemiotic community, it focuses on what the volume offers to those who explain human intellect in relation to what Turing called our ‘physical powers.’ In scrutinising the basis of world-modelling, parallels and contrasts are drawn with other work on embodied-embedded cognition. Models dominate biology. Is this a qualitative fact or does it point to biomechanisms? In evaluating the 18 contributions, it is suggested that the answers will shape the field. First, they will decide if biochemistry and explanatory reduction can be synergised by biosemantics. Second, they will show if our intellectual powers arise from biology. Does thinking use—not a language faculty—but what Marko? and colleagues call semiosis by the living? Resolution of such issues, it is suggested, can change how we view cognition. Above all, if the biomechanists win the day, cultural models can be regarded as extending natural meaning. On such a view, biomechanisms prompt us to act and perceive as we model our own natural models. This fits Craik’s vision: intellect gives us the alphanumerical ‘symbols’ that allow thoughts to have objective validity. For the biomechanist, this is explained—not by brains alone—but, rather, by acting under the constraints of historically extended sensoria.     

Butterflies & wild bees: biology teachers’ PCK development through citizen science*

Citizen science is a rapidly growing emerging field in science and it is gaining importance in education. Therefore, this study was conducted to document the pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) of biology teachers who participated in a citizen science project involving observation of wild bees and identification of butterflies. In this paper, knowledge about how these biological methods can be taught to students is presented. After two years in the project, four teachers were interviewed and their PCK was captured in the form of content representations (CoRes) and Pedagogical and Professional-Experience Repertoires (PaP-eRs). These results can help future citizen science projects to link their activities to the school curriculum. But not only success can be reported: although one of the project team’s aims was to make the Nature of Science accessible to the teachers and students in the course of the project, the teachers did not take this aspect into account. This paper discusses the possible reasons and proposes various strategies for improving citizen science in the context of school biology learning.     

How fieldwork-oriented biology teachers establish formal outdoor education practices

ABSTRACT

Fieldwork is an important part of biology as well as science and biology education. However, teachers perceive several reasons for the limited use of fieldwork in schools. Further, outdoor education is often organised as a single fieldtrip guided by outdoor educators, and little research has been done on fieldwork as a regular part of formal biology education. This case study explores three secondary-school biology teachers who untypically use outdoor education as a major part of their ecology courses for 8^th grade students (median age 14). Berger and Luckmann’s theory of the process of institutionalization as a theoretical background is used to interpret the pedagogical and organizational choices of the case study teachers. Analysis of the interviews of the selected three teachers revealed pedagogical and organizational means through which outdoor teaching is institutionalized into a regular activity in biology lessons. The teachers considered regularity, assessment practices and the school curriculum as major tools to legitimate outdoor learning as a formal schoolwork and foster successful learning. However, they also emphasised students’ freedom during outdoor activities. The findings are discussed in terms of how the teachers succeeded in combining the institutional order of formal schooling with students’ freedom in nature.     

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.     

Differences in how biology teachers represent content structure in classroom discourse: a video-based analysis

Despite the importance of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) in practical teaching and the inconsistency of teacher quality in different regions in China, there is little empirical evidence for specific differences in teachers’ PCK in different districts in China. This study attempted to address this gap through analysis of practical teaching demonstrations by three pairs of biology teachers; each pair comprised one teacher from Beijing and one from Hebei province. The teaching content was the same for each pair, including a discussion of blood, blood type, and the heart. The practical teaching demonstration was videotaped for each teacher. Analysis of the PCK focused on one aspect: content structure. Analysis of the six lessons suggested that the Beijing biology teacher presented more structured biology terms than did the Handan biology teacher in each pair. The Beijing biology teachers also performed better in connecting the new knowledge with previously learned knowledge than Handan biology teachers. The current study contributes to the methods for capturing teachers’ PCK in classroom discourse, and it indicates specific differences between Handan and Beijing teachers in the ability to make connections in students’ knowledge.     

Scientific perspectivism: A philosopher of science's response to the challenge of big data biology

Big data biology—bioinformatics, computational biology, systems biology (including ‘omics’), and synthetic biology—raises a number of issues for the philosophy of science. This article deals with several such: Is data-intensive biology a new kind of science, presumably post-reductionistic? To what extent is big data biology data-driven? Can data ‘speak for themselves?’ I discuss these issues by way of a reflection on Carl Woese’s worry that “a society that permits biology to become an engineering discipline, that allows that science to slip into the role of changing the living world without trying to understand it, is a danger to itself.” And I argue that scientific perspectivism, a philosophical stance represented prominently by Giere, Van Fraassen, and Wimsatt, according to which science cannot as a matter of principle transcend our human perspective, provides the best resources currently at our disposal to tackle many of the philosophical issues implied in the modeling of complex, multilevel/multiscale phenomena.     

Good student questions in inquiry learning

Acquisition of scientific reasoning is one of the big challenges in education. A popular educational strategy advocated for acquiring deep knowledge is inquiry-based learning, which is driven by emerging ‘good questions’. This study will address the question: ‘Which design features allow learners to refine questions while preserving student ownership of the inquiry process?’ This design-based research has been conducted over several years with advanced high-school biology classes. The results confirm the central role of question elaboration as an interactive process that leads from vague to complex and adequate. To make this happen, the inquiry process must extend over a long time, learners and teachers should share a knowledge improvement goal, and text produced by students should be structured by question–answer pairs addressing a single concept using authentic resources. Further features are discussion with peers, teacher feedback with respect to answer elaboration and conceptual differentiation, and finally, teacher guidance that should fade out in successive inquiry cycles to ensure student responsibility.     

Metacognitive inquiry activities for instructing the central dogma concept: ‘button code’ and ‘beaded bracelet making’

ABSTRACT

The central dogma of biology is difficult to learn because its microscopic processes cannot be visualized. This study aimed to devise two inquiry activities: ‘Button Code’ and ‘Beaded Bracelet Making,’ involving the concepts of DNA replication and protein synthesis based on the Metacognitive Learning Cycle (MLC) for students, and to explore the effectiveness of concept learning of the central dogma, how students’ metacognition may be expressed, and students’ perceptions of their inquiry performance. We developed a ‘Concept journal’ including metacognitive scaffolds, and employed the ‘Central Dogma Achievement Test’ as a tool for the above purpose. A total of 18 junior high school students participated in this inquiry course instructed by two of the authors. The results showed that students’ achievement performance was significantly improved on the whole, the students’ metacognition was expressed during the process of inquiry with scaffolding, and most students gave positive responses about their learning performance. According to the results, this inquiry course could develop students’ comprehension of the central dogma concept, and give students opportunities to practice metacognition that might lead to effective learning in inquiry activities. The implications and expandability of this course are discussed.     

The more the merrier: how homo-oligomerization alters the interactome and function of ribonucleotide reductase

Stereotyped as a nexus of dNTP synthesis, the dual-subunit enzyme — ribonucleotide reductase (RNR) — is coming into view as a paradigm of oligomerization and moonlighting behavior. In the present issue of ‘omics’, we discuss what makes the larger subunit of this enzyme (RNR-α) so interesting, highlighting its emerging cellular interactome based on its unique oligomeric dynamism that dictates its compartment-specific occupations. Linking the history of the field with the multivariable nature of this exceedingly sophisticated enzyme, we further discuss implications of new data pertaining to DNA-damage response, S-phase checkpoints, and ultimately tumor suppression. We hereby hope to provide ideas for those interested in these fields and exemplify conceptual frameworks and tools that are useful to study RNR's broader roles in biology.     

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.     

Procedural understanding in biology: the ‘thinking behind the doing’

Several developments in science education aim to improve pupils' ability to ‘think scientifically’. This paper argues for the explicit teaching of the ideas that pupils need to ‘think about’ to do this; ideas related to the design of investigations and the collection, presentation, analysis, and evaluation of the resulting evidence — ideas which are important both for pupils who continue to study or work with biology and for all pupils to become biologically literate. This paper considers some of the concepts of evidence which are particularly important to biology, and discusses how and why the ideas could be taught.     

Budding biology teachers: what have botanical gardens got to offer inquiry learning

Teachers conceptualise inquiry learning in science learning differently. This is particularly evident when teachers are introduced to inquiry pedagogy within a new context. This exploratory study draws on semi-structured interviews conducted with eight pre-service secondary biology teachers following a day visit with university tutors to the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew. Emerging findings were: first, pre-service biology teachers’ views of inquiry learning range in sophistication from simple notions of ‘learning from doing’ to complex multi-notions such as student generated questions, developing curiosity and encouraging authentic scientific practices. Second, similarly their views of inquiry learning opportunities in botanical gardens ranged from simply places that offered ‘memorable experiences’ to enabling autonomous learning due to the organism diversity and multiple climates. Pre-service teachers categorised as having unsophisticated views of inquiry learning had limited expectations of botanical gardens as productive learning environments. Third, the majority of pre-service teachers were concerned about managing inquiry learning. A tension was identified between how open-ended an inquiry activity could be whilst ensuring student focus. Further, participants were concerned about the practical management of inquiry learning. We discuss implications for teacher educators and botanical garden educators and the requirement for curriculum development and promotion.     

Focus

A solid background in population ecology is valuable for anyone concerned with natural resources management. However, without the opportunity of field experience, it may be difficult for students to become familiar with some of the principles of population biology. Microcomputers and programmable pocket calculators allow the construction of simple simulation models, making it possible to carry out some ‘numerical experiments’ in the classroom which may play the same role in the learning process as in vivo experimentation

This work introduces a mathematical model based on the Lotka—Volterra equations and a computer program developed for a programmable calculator. They can be used to assess the influence of environmental heterogeneity and disturbances on the results of competitive relationships between two plant populations. As an example, the interaction between two tussock grass species of the Patagonian steppe, Stipa speciosa Trin. et Rupr. and Festuca pallescens (St Yves) Parodi (the second being less xerophytic than the first one), is analysed.     

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。