In an academic semester, living in social isolation and under restrictions of the pandemic, we organized weekly multidisciplinary seminars from a postgraduate course program in Curitiba, Southern Brazil, integrating students from different regions of Brazil and South America. Outstanding researchers from Brazil, Germany, France, Argentina, Mexico,…

Short-answer questions are commonly used for assessment in secondary biology education, but their scope limits what can be observed. If a curriculum intends to encourage students to think deeply about how biological systems function, or to integrate physiology, development, evolution and ecology, then longer-answer assessments are required. This…

Providing hands-on practical education without access to laboratories during the COVID-19 pandemic has required creativity and innovation. In this paper, co-authored by academic staff and students, we describe an at-home mobile phone-based 'spectrophotometer' experiment used in an introductory undergraduate biology course. Using colour picker…

In the context of England, secondary biology education is dominated by sub-organismal systems, such as physiology, often to the detriment of evolution & ecology and impeding an integrated understanding of biology. This paper proposes a framework that teachers could use to help them consider how the learning of physiological and developmental…

Sex and fertility education is essential to enable people to make informed choices. School is an important source of education, so we examined the current curriculum relating to sex and fertility education in England and compared it with students' accounts of their experiences. We analysed the Awarding Body GCSE science and biology specifications…

GCSE examinations (taken by students aged 16 years in England) are not intended to be speeded (i.e. to be partly a test of how quickly students can answer questions). However, there has been little research exploring this. The aim of this research was to explore the speededness of past GCSE written examinations, using only the data from scored…

Bioinformatics is an essential discipline for biologists. It also has a reputation of being difficult for those without a strong quantitative and computer science background. At Lancaster University, we have developed modules for the integration of bioinformatics skills training into our undergraduate biology degree portfolio. This article…

Many technological applications (apps) purport to help children learn academic material. Building on research in developmental and educational psychology, we developed and tested an app to teach biological and physical science content to preschool children. There were 21 children in the control condition (M[subscript age] = 50.30 months, SD =…

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…

This paper argues that a shift in discourse about the nature and purpose of Further Education is under way in England. A recent White Paper, 'Skills for jobs: lifelong learning for opportunity and growth', issued by the UK government, is couched in terms which suggest that a prior reliance on the ideology of neoliberalism is now moving towards the…

In the period following a global pandemic, the promotion of health and wellbeing is a priority area for schools. This accompanies growing calls for health and wellbeing education to be delivered through a whole-child/whole-school approach that connects across subject areas. While it may be clear to most people that a purely scientific sexuality…

Balanced science was a possible answer to a perceived need in England, Wales and Northern Ireland for students to study the three major science subjects up to age 16 without taking too large a proportion of curriculum time. Experience has shown that it is not a simple problem to solve, and this article describes various attempts going back several…

Background: In England, practical work is a major part of secondary school science and yet little research has examined students' attitudes specifically to practical work. Purpose: To examine students' attitudes to practical work in biology chemistry and physics in secondary schools in England. Sample: The study involved 607 students from Year 7…

A strategic priority for university educators is to ensure graduates have developed a range of transferable skills. An important skill required by employers is the development of digital capabilities. The COVID-19 pandemic necessitated the move of courses into blended formats which provided an opportunity for educators to redesign their modules to…

For many students, their science education up to the age of 16 is their only formal introduction to genetics. They live in an age where the results of genomic studies will have increasing importance for their health and well-being. This article uses Piaget's conceptions of concrete and formal thinking as tools for considering the conceptual…