Over the past two decades, Turkey has initiated a reform movement to change her classroom assessment system to accommodate performance-based alternative assessment methods in schools. However, research investigating the impact of assessment reform on learning and teaching in schools report that performance assessment approaches have not been…

Studies over the last 30 years have considered various factors related to student success in introductory biology courses. While much of the available literature suggests that the best predictors of success in a college course are prior college grade point average (GPA) and class attendance, faculty often require a valuable predictor of success in…

Background: While the literature on strategy use is relatively mature, measures of strategy use overwhelmingly measure only one aspect of that use, frequency, when relating that strategy use to performance outcomes. While this might be one important attribute of strategy use, there is increasing evidence that quality and conditional use of…

Undergraduate students often lack opportunities to comprehend, present, and produce scientific literature as part of their regular curriculum. In courses that have already been already developed, students either analyzed a few journal articles and/or studied disciplinary content typically with the assistance of a textbook. In this study, I have…

The aim of this study was to investigate 9th grade biology students' cognitive structures about the basic components of the living organisms and association between the concepts forming these basic components. Participants consisted of 50 9th grade biology students in two secondary schools in the northwest of Turkey. Data were collected by the…

Many educators and educational institutions worldwide have agreed that the main goal of science education is to produce a scientifically literate community. Science teachers are key to the achievement of scientific literacy at all levels of education because of the essential role they play in preparing scientifically literate individuals. Studies…

One of the main forms of educational process in teaching students is educational and field practice; it is a relatively independent form of training and education of students. A summer educational and field practice is complicated pedagogical system regarding the structure and functional components, which includes theoretical and practical…

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…

This paper reports on an Action Research project that investigated the integration of Aboriginal and Western knowledge into science learning in a Montessori classroom in regional Queensland, Australia. Drawing on the local knowledge of fauna of community members, the study explored the teaching of science to 12 year 8-9 students in an Aboriginal…

Using Piaget's perspective of individual cognition and Vygotsky's theory of social constructivism as lenses, this paper reports on the instructional prompts that are used by biology lecturers to promote student interaction. The study further reports on the link between the prompts used and the subsequent quality of the interaction. Three lecturers…

The present study aims to demonstrate, by means of a meta-analysis, the effectiveness of Project-Based Learning in the context of academic performance and various study characteristics. For this purpose, the relevant literature was reviewed to identify studies using Project-Based Learning in the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, and science.…

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'…

Despite the importance of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) in practical teaching and the inconsistency of teacher quality in different regions in China, there is little empirical evidence for specific differences in teachers' PCK in different districts in China. This study attempted to address this gap through analysis of practical teaching…

The purpose of this study was to investigate what factors lead to disparate views of online teaching among faculty in the biological sciences. The population for this study included full-time community college and university faculty members teaching biology courses in northeast Texas. The study was conducted using an online survey that included…

The general public harbors misconceptions about mental illnesses; particularly, auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs). Misconceptions about the causes, dangerousness, and treatment of mental illnesses constitute barriers for treatment. The purpose of this study was to examine whether a neurobiological refutation text was more effective than a…