The use of live animals in instruction plays an important role in biological education, with the intention that attitudes and emotions should be positively influenced. To date, studies in this field have given mixed results, and there has certainly been a lack of studies on student attitudes and knowledge of poisonous and venomous animals. This…

Bed bugs are on the rise and are increasingly perceived as harmful parasites. Because individuals affected by bed bugs often feel disgust and shame and are stigmatized, bed bugs are an important public health and environmental justice concern and therefore a health education issue as well. In this quasi-experimental study, we examine how different…

Biodiversity issues can fruitfully be adopted as contexts of Education for Sustainable Development, as they involve ecological, economic and social dimensions. But as these contexts are demanding to teach, we need to know more about motivational factors to determine how teacher education should be conducted to lead to motivated teachers. To study…

Contact with living animals is an exceptional possibility within biology education to facilitate an intense immersion into the study topic and even allow for a flow experience (Csikszentmihalyi 2000). Further, it might affect the perceptions of the students' basic needs for autonomy and competence and thereby their quality of motivation (Deci and…

The importance of genetic factors in autism has prompted the development of mutant mouse models to advance our understanding of biological mechanisms underlying autistic behaviors. Mouse models of human neuropsychiatric diseases are designed to optimize (1) face validity, i.e., resemblance to the human symptoms; (2) construct validity, i.e.,…