The past decade has been marked by a series of global crises, presenting an opportunity to reevaluate the relationship between science and politics. The biological sciences are instrumental in understanding natural phenomena and informing policy decisions. However, scholars argue that current scientific expertise often fails to account for entire…

Images, such as photographs and diagrams, play an important role in the teaching and learning of science. To optimize student learning, educational science images should be designed to facilitate the cognitive processes relevant to comprehension. One such process is comparison, which involves aligning multiple representations on the basis of their…

While interdisciplinary collaboration is desired among researchers, traditional science instruction generally results in science disciplines being taught as separate entities. This study focuses on student understanding of concepts at the intersection of two isolated disciplines--geoscience and bioscience--across two purposeful samples of…

The theory of evolution is the backbone of the biological sciences. Arguably, this is the reason why evolution education is an extensively investigated issue in several countries around the world. Little is known, however, about the views of university students in Colombia. Here, we report on 7 years of data generated by a three-question anonymous…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the mathematical needs of biological sciences undergraduate students. Student needs were measured through a needs assessment methodology scheme that included a content analysis of peer-reviewed journals, a nationwide cross-sectional survey, and semi-structured interviews. The research question that…

Evolution is the unifying theory in biological sciences, yet in the United States, a majority of the population holds beliefs that are in conflict with those concepts and therefore are not completely open to considering evolutionary theory. The Gallup poll on evolution, creationism and intelligent design is one of the longest running polls…

Technological and methodological advances, in particular next-generation sequencing and chromatin profiling, has led to a deluge of data on epigenetic mechanisms and processes. Epigenetic regulation in the brain is no exception. In this commentary, Ehud Lamm writes that extending existing frameworks for thinking about psychological development to…

Life exhibitions in Japanese science museums (SMs) face difficulties in coping with rapid progress in the life sciences owing to certain constraints around the frequency of exhibit renovations, and the Japanese indigenous understanding of the natural world (Shizen) that Japanese visitors unconsciously bring with them. To what extent do current…

Students often have misconceptions about natural selection as they misuse a direct causal schema to explain the process. Natural selection is in fact an emergent process where random interactions lead to changes in a population. The misconceptions stem from students' lack of emergent schema for natural selection. In order to help students…

Students' explanations of biological phenomena are frequently characterized by disconnects between levels and confusion of levels. The purpose of this research is to investigate the effects of a hands-on lab activity that aims at fostering the ability to reason across levels. A total of 197 students (18 years of age) participated in a randomized,…

Evolution is fundamental to biology and scientific literacy, but teaching high school evolution is often difficult. Evolution teachers face several challenges including limited content knowledge, personal conflicts with evolution, expectations of resistance, concerns about students' conflicts with religion, and curricular constraints. Evolution…

The present research aims to determine whether or not pre-service science teachers in Turkey are resistant to learning about the theory of evolution (TOE), and to understand the reasons for their acceptance or rejection of this theory. Following an intervention process, essay documents were collected from each participant ("N" = 113) and…

Recent research suggests that a major obstacle to evolution understanding is an essentialist view of the biological world. The present study investigated the effects of formal biology instruction on such misconceptions. Participants (N = 291) completed an assessment of their understanding of six aspects of evolution (variation, inheritance,…

New science standards and reform recommendations spanning grades K--16 focus on a limited set of key scientific concepts from each discipline that all students should know. They also emphasize the integration of these concepts with science practices so that students learn not only the "what" of science but also the "how" and…

Evolution was introduced into the senior secondary school Life Sciences curriculum in South Africa for the first time in 2008. Research in other countries shows that evolution is an extremely controversial topic to teach, raising serious concerns for teachers. Curriculum change theory dealing with "stages of concern" suggests that…