This short paper presents an educational approach to teaching three popular methods for encoding DNA sequences: one-hot encoding, binary encoding, and integer encoding. Aimed at bioinformatics and computational biology students, our learning intervention focuses on developing practical skills in implementing these essential techniques for…

Human-driven carbon emissions have resulted in increased levels of dissolved carbon dioxide in the Earth's oceans. This dissolved carbon dioxide reacts with water to form carbonic acid, which impacts ocean acidity as well as the solubility of carbonate-containing compounds, with far-reaching impacts on marine ecosystems and the human communities…

When conducting scientific research, experts in molecular and cellular biology (MCB) use specific reasoning strategies to construct mechanistic explanations for the underlying causal features of molecular phenomena. We explored how undergraduate students applied this scientific practice in MCB. Drawing from studies of explanation building among…

Next-generation sequencing (NGS)-based methods are revolutionizing biology. Their prevalence requires biologists to be increasingly knowledgeable about computational methods to manage the enormous scale of data. As such, early introduction to NGS analysis and conceptual connection to wet-lab experiments is crucial for training young scientists.…

This book has been prepared to introduce common technological tools that can be used in science education in the distance education process. Although most of the applications introduced in the book are used in face-to-face education, this book focuses on their use in the distance science education process. In the Introduction part of the book, the…

Phylogenetic trees have become increasingly important across the life sciences, and as a result, learning to interpret and reason from these diagrams is now an essential component of biology education. Unfortunately, students often struggle to understand phylogenetic trees. Style (i.e., diagonal or bracket) is one factor that has been observed to…

Research on the design of learning environments for K-12 science education has been informed by two bodies of literature: inquiry-based science and Constructionism. Inquiry-based science has emphasized engagement in activities that reflect authentic scientific practices. Constructionism has focused on designing intuitively accessible authoring…

Previous research has documented that students who engage with socioscientific issues can acquire some of the complex competences and skills typically related to scientific literacy. But an emerging field of research on science teachers' understanding and use of socioscientific issues, has documented that a range of challenges hinders the uptake…

Research Findings: Anthropomorphism--the attribution of human characteristics to nonhuman entities--has long been a staple of children's media. However, children's experiences with anthropomorphic media may interfere with biological reasoning instead encouraging an anthropocentric view of the natural world. To date, little research has addressed…

Undergraduate biology education reform aims to engage students in scientific practices such as experimental design, experimentation, and data analysis and communication. Graphs are ubiquitous in the biological sciences, and creating effective graphical representations involves quantitative and disciplinary concepts and skills. Past studies…

This paper presents findings from a two-phase mixed methods study investigating the phenomenological structure of self-relevance among ninth-grade junior high school biology students (Phase 1: N = 118; Phase 2: N = 139). We begin with a phenomenological multidimensional definition of self-relevance as comprising three dimensions: the academic…

This study examined age differences in young people's understanding of evolution theory in secondary school. A second aim of this study was to propose a new coding scheme that more accurately described students' conceptual understanding about evolutionary theory. We argue that coding schemes adopted in previous research may have overestimated…

The concept of energy serves biologists as a powerful analytical model to describe phenomena that occurs in the natural world. Due to the concept's relevance, educational standards of different countries identify energy as a core idea for the teaching and learning of biology and other science subjects. However, previous research on students'…

Recent research supports the benefit of students' construction of relevance through writing about the connection of content to their life. However, most such research defines relevance narrowly as utility value--perceived instrumentality of the content to the student's career goals. Furthermore, the scope of phenomenological and conceptual…

Previous work has shown that students have persistent difficulties in understanding how central dogma processes can be affected by a stop codon mutation. To explore these difficulties, we modified two multiple-choice questions from the Genetics Concept Assessment into three open-ended questions that asked students to write about how a stop codon…