Information literacy (IL) is an essential skill for Biology students amidst the development of information flow. Several studies show that students' IL is still low and needs to be improved. One of the courses that students consider difficult is Animal Physiology due to the nature of the discipline. Educators tend to apply three different learning…

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…

Critical thinking is one of the most important sets of cognitive abilities and dispositions required for both scientists and global citizens. In this explorative study, we examine which critical thinking aspects are perceived as relevant by biology graduate students and in what ways they found these aspects important for their scientific work.…

In the past, students' participation in science competitions has been positively associated with their aspirations to pursue a career in science. Previous studies, however, were predominantly focused around successful competitors, overlooking the largest group of participants: those who are faced with early elimination. We therefore aimed to…

Undergraduate biology educators strive to understand how to best teach students the concepts of climate change. The root of this understanding is the establishment of what students know about climate change. This research aims to describe undergraduate biology students' conceptions of climate change and their argument practices and associated…

Background: Institutions of higher learning are persistently struggling with issues of academic dishonesty such as plagiarism, despite the availability of university policies and guidelines for upholding academic integrity. Methodology: This was a descriptive qualitative study conducted on 37 students of a Healthcare Ethics course at an Australian…

Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs) are attractive solutions for scaling undergraduate research experiences at primarily undergraduate teaching institutions, where resources for faculty research activities can be limited. The Sustainable Interdisciplinary Research to Inspire Undergraduate Success (SIRIUS) project is a unique…

There is a growing need for more effective interdisciplinary science instruction across undergraduate degree programs. In addition to supporting students' connections between disciplinary concepts, interdisciplinary learning can develop students' critical thinking skills and allow them to evaluate scientific investigations and claims between…

Prior research suggests most students do not glean valid cues from provided visuals, resulting in reduced metacomprehension accuracy. Across 4 experiments, we explored how the presence of instructional visuals affects students' metacomprehension accuracy and cue-use for different types of metacognitive judgments. Undergraduates read texts on…

Developing metacognition in students is essential for fostering critical thinking in school. One of the skills necessary to achieve this goal is the cultivation of metacognitive vigilance--a potential means to regulate some ways of thinking held by individuals. Of particular importance is essentialism, as it underlies discourses such as racism and…

High levels of student anxiety are negatively related to degree persistence, academic achievement, and student perceptions of instructor support. Anxiety levels vary along many axes--among classes, within students in the same class, and over time--creating a dynamic emotional landscape in classrooms. In this study, we examined the relationship…

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…

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,…

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…