Previous research has shown that students employ intuitive thinking when understanding scientific concepts. Three types of intuitive thinking--essentialist, teleological, and anthropic thinking--are used in biology learning and can lead to misconceptions. However, it is unknown how commonly these types of intuitive thinking, or cognitive…

Understanding molecular processes and coordinating the various activities across levels of organization in biological systems is a complicated task, yet many curricular guidelines indicate that undergraduate students should master it. Employing mechanistic reasoning can facilitate describing and investigating biological phenomena. Biofilms are an…

Wetlands ecosystems play an important role and are relevant to biotic and abiotic factors including survival of humans. Therefore, it is imperative that learners in Lesotho become sensitized to the knowledge about the ecology of wetland ecosystems. Few studies investigated Lesotho students' ecological literacy of wetlands hence this study explored…

Do people think about genetic inheritance as a deterministic or probabilistic process? Do adults display systematic biases when reasoning about genetic inheritance? Knowing how adults think about genetic inheritance is valuable, both for understanding the developmental endpoint of these concepts and for identifying biases that persist even after…

Explaining biological phenomena requires understanding how different processes function and describing interactions between components at various levels of organization over time and space in biological systems. This is a desired competency yet is a complicated and often challenging task for undergraduate biology students. Therefore, we need a…

Molecular biology can be challenging for undergraduate students because it requires visual literacy skills to interpret abstract representations of submicroscopic concepts, structures, and processes. The Conceptual-Reasoning-Mode framework suggests that visual literacy relies on applying conceptual knowledge to appropriately reason with the…

This study investigates undergraduate STEM students' interpretation of quantities and quantitative relationships on graphical representations in biology (population growth) and chemistry (titration) contexts. Interviews (n = 15) were conducted to explore the interplay between students' covariational reasoning skills and their use of disciplinary…

Students' knowledge of data analysis determines the quality of the research they report but they tend to perceive courses on statistics or data analysis as challenging and unappealing. The present study aimed to investigate the correlation between biology education students' attitudes toward statistics and their proficiency in determining various…

In this article, we report on a National Science Foundation-funded immersive international summer research program for biology students. Six students, representing Cohort 1 of a three-year program, spent 9 weeks at one of three institutes in Japan, working on related molecular, cellular, and developmental research projects under the mentorship of…

The conceptions that prospective primary teachers (PPTs) have about breastfeeding (BF) were explored as part of their training in school content related to health and the human body. For this, the PPTs answered a questionnaire designed ad hoc, without having received any prior training about the topic. The questionnaire had previously been…

Active-learning instructors are more effective when they use pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) to anticipate, interpret, and respond to student thinking. PCK is topic-specific and includes knowledge of student thinking (e.g., common difficulties) and knowledge of instructional strategies (e.g., effective learning tasks). Currently, we know…

Introductory biology is a gateway course for majors and other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. Despite the importance of chemistry content knowledge for understanding biology, the relationship between chemistry knowledge and prior coursework and biology course performance is understudied. We used an opportunity…

The curriculum for undergraduate Agricultural Engineering does not usually include much laboratory practice. In order to address this, here we propose the design of a practical class on legume-rhizobia symbiosis, using an interdisciplinary approach that takes elements from botany, agriculture, and microbiology. The students perform an assay to…

The purpose of the drawing method is to reveal the hidden beliefs, attitudes, knowledge and understanding of students without being dependent on words. It is more useful than other techniques in that it is easy to apply and a lot of data can be obtained with a drawing. Some misconceptions can be revealed by asking students to describe or…

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…