Despite the growing influence of the "material" turn within childhood studies and education, scholarship related to teaching and learning within the early childhood classroom remains a largely humanistic endeavour. By applying relational and multispecies onto-epistomologies to both children's classroom relations "and" our own…

Evolution is the integrative framework of the life sciences. Even though the topic is often not formally introduced before high school, young children already have various ideas about evolutionary principles (variation, inheritance, and selection) and their underlying key concepts (e.g., differential fitness, reproduction, and speciation).…

The aim of this study is to examine the opinions of prospective teachers about biology and nature-related activities for mentally disabled students. The survey method was used in this quantitative study. Attitude scale towards biology and nature-related activities for mentally disabled students was used as a data collection tool. The scale was…

With the onset of global change, forest species diversity has declined in recent decades as pristine habitat in biological hotspots rapidly diminishes. Many carbon mitigation efforts directed at decreasing emissions from forest degradation and destruction assume that faunal biodiversity will benefit from such efforts. Yet, conservation of faunal…

This study investigated with the help of in-depth interviews and a think-aloud-approach how 10- to12-year-old children (n = 46) in the Canton of Berne, Switzerland, get to know species, how they identify plants and animals, and for how important they consider species knowledge to be. Own observations and sensual experiences coupled with positive…

Children worldwide are increasingly deprived of direct nature experiences (DNE). Often rooted in restrictions of urbanization and modernization, this loss may hamper biodiversity conservation through erosion of biodiversity knowledge. Yet, the extent of this phenomenon in small cities, particularly in rapidly developing islands, remains…

The ability of living organisms to respond and adapt to a changing climate is an urgent concern. However, current educational efforts aimed at increasing US undergraduate student climate literacy primarily focus on the causes of, and abiotic responses to, climate change, mostly neglecting the biotic impacts. Here, we present a new framework, the…

"Invasive" species are generally viewed with contempt. Yet many Indigenous peoples have more nuanced approaches to newcomer species informed by kinship relations, and some ecologists suggest that ecosystems have always been dynamic and these species occasionally play beneficial roles in their new homes. A critical and decolonial…

Nearly 14 million species are estimated to exist on Earth, of which 1.8 million have been identified, and new species are being added to the world of science every day. Therefore, scientists are aware that there are still unidentified species living globally. Biodiversity is a wide concept encompassing all living things in our living space. This…

The Physiology Core Concept of flow down gradients is a major concept in physiology, as pressure gradients are the key driving force for the bulk flow of fluids in biology. However, students struggle to understand that this principle is foundational to the mechanisms governing bulk flow across diverse physiological systems (e.g., blood flow,…

This paper explores children's understandings of Acknowledgement to Country practices and Aboriginal knowledges. Guided by the relational lenses of respect, responsibility and reciprocity, we conducted focus groups with children across five Australian early education centres. We found that Acknowledgement practices were evident through recitation…

Analogical reasoning is an important type of cognition often used by experts across domains. Little research, however, has investigated how generating analogies can support college students' self-regulated learning (SRL) of biology. This study therefore evaluated a contextualized cognitive learning strategy intervention designed to teach students…

This research aimed to compare the effect of teaching science through-creative-drama activities and student-centred inquiry-based teaching on the cognitive structures of primary school pupils about the classification of living things. It was designed as an exploratory action research case study and the contribution of both interventions on the…

Using living organisms in biology education is a common practice that provides students with direct contact with living beings in the classroom. Several benefits and barriers of using organisms in classrooms have been proposed in the literature. Hence, biology teachers should carefully consider the pros and cons of using living organisms, and…

Interpreting the landscape that surrounds us is somewhat personal. However, it is necessary to explore the interpretation made by future teachers so that we can reflect on their observations. This study collected data from five academic years of undergraduates in Early Childhood Education (N = 421), who were asked to fill out a questionnaire with…