The historical dimension of biology attests to the various conceptions of living organisms that have governed the construction of scientific knowledge over time, some of which still persist today. The present study aimed to identify and characterise the various conceptions of living organisms held by future teachers and biologists and the…

Natural Selection is prevalent throughout life science learning standards across K-12 contexts. Additionally, undergraduates who are interested in the fields of biology and education must also be well informed on the topic, as it is foundational to some biology research and necessary to touch upon within elementary and secondary classrooms. This…

The purpose of this study was to explore science teachers' conceptions about micro-and macro-evolutionary processes. In this study, a case study was employed to compare and contrast novice and experienced middle school science teachers' evolution conceptions. The data were collected using four micro-and macro-evolutionary scenarios alongside…

This paper gives an example of how to address the challenge of designing a learning progression that describes student thinking, with the necessary specificity to align instructional opportunities and assessment tools. We describe the Conceptual Underpinnings of Evolution project and the iterative process of developing a novel learning progression…

An understanding of biological variation is important for understanding ecological interactions, ecosystem function, and species' response to environmental change. Biological variation is essential to species survival because natural selection acts upon the phenotypic variation within a population: the more varied the population's genetic…

Evolutionary evidence is important scientific background for appreciating the theory of evolution. We describe a STEAM-based lesson plan that uses paleontological drawings and a modern evolutionary database to explore and understand fossil, morphological, and molecular evidence. Together, with a focus on arthropods and the Cambrian explosion,…

Central to evolution is the concept of a common ancestry from which all life has emerged over immense time scales, but learning and teaching temporal aspects of evolution remain challenging. This study investigated students' interpretation of evolutionary time when engaging with a multi-touch tabletop application called DeepTree, a dynamic…

The integrative role that Evolutionary theory plays within Biology is recognised by most scientific authors, as well as in governmental education policies, including Brazilian policies. However, teaching and learning evolution seems problematic in many countries, and Brazil is among those. Many factors may affect teachers' and students'…

We developed and validated the Conceptual Assessment of Natural Selection (CANS), a multiple-choice test designed to assess how well college students understand the central principles of natural selection. The expert panel that reviewed the CANS concluded its questions were relevant to natural selection and generally did a good job sampling the…

With evolutionary biology relatively recently introduced into the South African school curriculum, the need arose to explore practising teachers' knowledge of the subject. A number of anticipated as well as unanticipated cognitive and affective barriers to the understanding of evolutionary biology were identified from a questionnaire with…

This paper presents an activity that engages students in model-based reasoning, requiring them to predict the behavior of the trp and lac operons under different environmental conditions. Students are presented six scenarios for the "trp" operon and five for the "lac" operon. In most of the scenarios, specific mutations have…

Understanding genetic drift is crucial for a comprehensive understanding of biology, yet it is difficult to learn because it combines the conceptual challenges of both evolution and randomness. To help assess strategies for teaching genetic drift, we have developed and evaluated the Genetic Drift Inventory (GeDI), a concept inventory that measures…

Students regard evolutionary theory differently than science in general. Students' reported confidence in their ability to understand science in general (e.g., posing scientific questions, interpreting tables and graphs, and understanding the content of their biology course) significantly outweighed their confidence in understanding evolution. We…