Following the COVID-19 lockdown, the BSc in Human Biology Program of the University of Nicosia switched from face-to-face to online delivery mode. Herein we describe how we identified and managed the challenges that arose to successfully complete the Semester.

In this study, we propose an 'Approach to Modeling' (AtM) framework for examining how undergraduates approach tasks that require modelling scientific phenomena. Our framework is adapted from Approach to Learning (AtL) theories and consists of three observable behavioural constructs: metacognition, generative thinking, and causal reasoning. Twenty…

Teaching is a noble profession to educate the youth of nations facing today's global challenges. Teaching, at the same time, has become a highly challenging profession and occasionally a draining work, especially for those who are working in the remote areas. A high-level of teacher absenteeism in the primary schools of Southern Papua has blown…

Undergraduate laboratory courses, owing to their larger sizes and shorter time slots, are often conducted in highly structured modes. However, this approach is known to interfere with students' engagement in the experiments. To enhance students' engagement, we propose an alternative mode of running laboratory courses by creating some…

The "Vision and Change" report called for the biology community to mobilize around teaching the core concepts of biology. This essay describes a collection of resources developed by several different groups that can be used to respond to the report's call to transform undergraduate education at both the individual course and departmental…

This study aims to determine the opinions of prospective biology teachers about outdoor learning environments by drawing on the cases of museum visit and scientific field trip. In line with this aim, phenomenology research design was utilized. Criterion sampling, which is one of the purposeful sampling methods used in qualitative research studies,…

The current article serves a dual purpose: to highlight the overlooked and recent concept of parenting-related exhaustion and to propose a specific methodology to test concurrent variations of the parent's exhaustion with the partner's exhaustion and her or his perceived and given support. Questionnaire data were collected from 97 mother-father…

Research synthesis on simple yet general hypotheses and ideas is challenging in scientific disciplines studying highly context-dependent systems such as medical, social, and biological sciences. This study shows that machine learning, equation-free statistical modeling of artificial intelligence, is a promising synthesis tool for discovering novel…

Past research on group work has primarily focused on promoting change through implementation of interventions designed to increase performance. Recently, however, education researchers have called for more descriptive analyses of group interactions. Through detailed qualitative analysis of recorded discussions, we studied the natural interactions…

This brief review explores the ever-increasing role that technological affordances may play in the 21C biochemistry and molecular biology curriculum. We consider the need to develop digital and creative fluencies in our students and the importance of creativity and visualization in learning science. The potential of virtual reality (VR) platforms…

Conrad Hal Waddington's epigenetic landscape is now a central paradigm in evolutionary developmental biology. This article proposes that it should be adopted into middle-years (ages 11-16) biology curricula as a way of visualising the interactions of the genome with the environment. The epigenetic landscape is explained, with some biographical…

Conrad Hal Waddington (1905--1975) was an English biologist who was especially interested in the big (metaphysical) questions of life. His thinking has become part of the foundation of modern systems biology. This article applies his thinking to middle-years school biology curricula (for ages 11-16), to see if their approach to epistemic questions…

It is common to use anthropomorphic labels when talking about technology, for example describing some robots and phones as smart, thinking and talking. This article describes a workshop in which students considered ways that words such as 'hearing', 'smart' and 'intelligence' might change in meaning when they are used in the context of robotics…

Changes in environmental conditions can have a profound impact on organismal processes. For aquatic organisms, changes in dissolved oxygen concentration can have major repercussions, notably for physiological processes that have high long-term energetic costs and are more likely to rely on aerobic metabolic pathways. Here we propose a simple…

Educational policy bodies worldwide have argued that practicing inquiry as a part of the K-12 curriculum would help prepare students for their lives as adults in today's world. This study investigated adults who graduated high school 9 years earlier with a major in biology, to determine how they perceive the inquiry project they experienced and…