Teaching and learning evolution is challenging. Biology education research shows that the underlying evolutionary concepts are poorly understood among students. This prevents a meaningful understanding of the central biological concepts. The instructional format of self-explanation prompts seems to be promising to respond to these difficulties.…

Systems' thinking has become increasingly relevant not only in education for sustainable development but also in everyday life. Even if teachers know the dynamics and complexity of living systems in biology and geography, they might not be able to effectively explain it to students. Teachers need an understanding of systems and their behaviour…

Self-Determination Theory and Flow Theory propose that perceived autonomy fosters the positive qualities of motivation and flow-experience. Autonomy-support can help to maintain students' motivation in very interesting learning activities and may lead to an increase in the positive qualities of motivation in less interesting learning activities.…

Background: Beginning teachers encounter several constraints with respect to scientific inquiry. Depending on their prior beliefs, knowledge and understanding, these constraints affect their teaching of inquiry. Purpose: To investigate quantitatively the longitudinal relationship between pre-service teachers' knowledge and attitudes on scientific…

The understanding of complex, dynamic and animate systems has a special standing in education for sustainable development and biology. Thus one important role of science teacher education is to promote student teachers' Content Related Knowledge (CRK) for teaching systems thinking, consisting of extensive Content Knowledge (CK) and well formed…

Promoting preservice science teachers' experimentation competency is required to provide a basis for meaningful learning through experiments in schools. However, preservice teachers show difficulties when experimenting. Previous research revealed that cognitive scaffolding promotes experimentation competency by structuring the learning process,…

This paper deals with an empirical study examining the effectiveness of interdisciplinary teaching in biology and physical education (PE) regarding the students' growth in knowledge. The study was conducted with 141 German sixth form students. In groups, they were taught three hours a week for a period of six weeks. In order to compare the…

Empirical analysis of secondary biology classrooms revealed that, on average, 68% of teaching time in Germany revolved around processing tasks. Quality of instruction can thus be assessed by analyzing the quality of tasks used in classroom discourse. This quasi-experimental study analyzed how teachers used tasks in 38 videotaped biology lessons…

Grolnick and Ryan (1987) assume that an autonomy supportive environment leads to higher learner engagement and thus to greater achievements and deeper understanding of content. In school, knowledge acquisition (rote learning as well as conceptual learning) are regarded as most important. In this study, we examined the effects of teachers' autonomy…

The planning of adequate control groups is a central aspect of educational research. Didactical studies, however, are often field studies encountering many problems of everyday classroom teaching? Recent research has indicated that teachers and their beliefs have an enormous influence on learning and retention. Taking this line of evidence…