Teaching Biology in an innovative way has always posed challenges due to its complex terminology and abstract concepts. This study explored the effects of reality pedagogy as an alternative instructional strategy on learner motivation and academic performance in learning biology at the ninth-grade level. To achieve this, a quasi-experimental…

Biology, a living science, is known as a balance and complement among other branches of science. Just like the science of biology, biology as a course also plays a very important role among other courses at all school types and grades. It is thought that the adults of the future should not be deprived of knowledge in the field of biology and…

This study aimed to investigate the effects of augmented reality (AR) activities on students' academic achievement and motivation in a biology course. For this purpose, a mixed study was conducted, and a pretest and posttest control group model was used. In addition, the opinions of the experimental group students and the teacher about the AR…

Although the benefits of addressing cognitive, social and affective aspects of learning in order to support conceptual change have been discussed in the literature, there are few studies of such interventions in the normal classroom. This study used a multidimensional conceptual change framework in order to teach five biology and physics topics…

Students evaluate their achievement in a specific domain in relation to their achievement in other domains and form their self-concepts accordingly. These comparison processes have been termed "dimensional comparisons" and shown to be an important source of academic self-concepts in addition to social and temporal comparisons. Research…

Analogies have many advantages for students such as concretizing abstract concepts and enabling motivation. Analogies are frequently used in textbooks. Research shows that the analogies in textbooks are not used based on certain directives and sometimes lead to misconceptions for students. Therefore, analysing the analogies in textbooks on several…

In today's world of information explosion, independent lifelong self-regulated learning (SRL) is becoming a necessity. However, opportunities in schools to experience such learning modes are relatively rare. This long-term explorative field study examined students' SRL of science. Changes in students' self-reported and enacted SRL…

For over a century, genetic arguments for the existence of racial inequality have been used to oppose policies that promote social equality. And, over that same time period, American biology textbooks have repeatedly discussed genetic differences between races. This experiment tests whether racial terminology in the biology curriculum causes…

Both the old National Science Education Standards (NSES) and the recent "Next Generation Science Standards" (NGSS) devote significant resources to learning about human environmental impact. Whereas the NSES advocate learning about human environmental impact in a section apart from the science- content learning strands, the NGSS embed…

The aim of this study is to determine 9th class students knowledge about the internal structures of mice and cockroaches using drawings. Drawings of 122 students from the 9th class of a high school in the center of Konya about the internal structures of mice and cockroaches have been analyzed. Drawings were analyzed independently by two…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of the conceptual change text based instruction on ninth grade students' understanding of ecological concepts, and attitudes toward biology and environment. Participants were 82 ninth grade students in a public high school in the Northwestern Turkey. A treatment was employed over a five-week…

The paper explores the relationship of the global and the local assessment discourses as expressed by Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) test items and school-based examinations, respectively. To this end, the paper compares PISA test items related to living systems and the context of life, health, and environment, with Greek…

High school biology teachers face many challenges as they teach evolution. State standards for evolution may provide support for sound evolution instruction. This study attempts to build upon previous work by investigating teachers' views of evolution standards and their evolution practices in a state where evolution standards have been…

During the 2009-10 school year, 42% of the students failed the biology segment of the EOCT, which affected not only the final grades of these students, but also overall school accountability. These results instigated some questions about the factors associated with students' success in biology; some of those factors related to the merit of single-…

To teach science writing effectively, scholars encourage combining writing to learn with applications of the science writing heuristic. How teachers learn to do so remains under-examined. This essay follows a cohort of ninth-grade science teachers who collaborated in a project to develop, test, and revise such a combination of writing prompts for…