As researchers, teachers, and practitioners we often encounter young professionals and lay adults who do not understand basics of mammalian body temperature regulation. Often their single solid piece of knowledge is that some vertebrates (mammals and birds) are warm-blooded and some (fish, amphibians, and reptile) are cold-blooded, which is…

Background/purpose: This study explores how animals associated with rivers and water are represented in Southern Vietnamese folk verses. It addresses the broader question of how language encodes cultural and ecological knowledge, focusing on cultural categorization as conceptualized in Cultural Linguistics. The research aims to uncover how the…

The exploitation of animals for human purposes raises several ethical concerns in the educational realm that ought to be carefully dealt with. Derived from the content analysis of sample of 39 Portuguese secondary and high school textbooks, this study aims to understand how factory-farmed animals are represented within the following themes: food…

In certain domains, people represent some of an individual's properties (e.g., a tiger's ferocity), but not others (e.g., a tiger's being in the zoo), as stemming from the assumed "essence" of the individual's category. How do children identify which properties of an individual are essentialized and which are not? Here, we examine…

Learning style (LS), either visual or verbal, has become debatable in the f ield of education vis-à-vis its relation to student success. However, it remains a valuable research theme for improving learning activities in the teaching of highly visual science fields, including biology, physics, and chemistry. Previous studies have primarily focused…

This study investigated the development of rapid visual object categorization. N = 20 adults (Experiment 1), N = 21 five to six-year-old children (Experiment 2), and N = 140 four-, seven-, and eleven-month-old infants (Experiment 3; all predominantly White, 81 females, data collected in 2013-2020) participated in a fast periodic visual stimulation…

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…

This article presents research designed along one scholar course with first-year pre-schoolers in Spain. A coherent sequence of learning activities, that combined classroom work with working outside the classroom (in the school garden), was designed in order to analyse if the first-year-preschool children were able to apply scientific tools,…

We systematically compared beliefs about animal (e.g., "lion"), artifactual (e.g., "hammer"), and institutional (e.g., "police officer") categories, aiming to identify whether people draw different inferences about which categories are subjective and which are socially constituted. We conducted two studies with 270…

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…

Although the empowerment of critical thinking (CT) has become an international concern that needs to be developed in the biology learning process for high school students, there still needs to be more relevant research literature. This study aimed to compare the effectiveness of implementing reading, questioning, and answering strategies…

Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) are tools used to introduce students to authentic participation in science. Several specific CUREs have been shown to benefit students' interest and retention in the biological sciences. Nevertheless, CUREs vary greatly in terms of their context, methodology, and degree of research…

In this article, we present how educational resources for zoology designed by undergraduate students help to propose means of action for teaching diversity and animal evolution in basic education. We realised that activities of creation and analysis of educational resources, in the context of didactic planning, have the potential to approximate…

We report our progress on the "River Memorial Museum" didactic intervention project developed with schools, in the basin of the Atoyac River in Mexico, that are significantly impacted by the pollution produced through industrialisation. The teachers of the elementary schools in these communities, environmental scientists, educators, and…