Students often have misconceptions about terrestrial carbon flows and there is a lack of coherence in students' explanations regarding the different levels of biological organisation at which these processes occur. In this study, problem-based teaching materials on the topic of terrestrial carbon flows were developed and tested with 15 students…

Energy is an important concept in all natural sciences, and a challenging one for school science education. Students' conceptual knowledge of energy is often low, and they entertain misconceptions. Educational research in science and mathematics suggests that learning through depictive representations and learning from errors, based on the theory…

At the botanical garden of the University of Würzburg, we conducted practical lessons on bionics, focused on the lotus effect, with 260 students. Those approx. 14 years old, 8th-grade mid-level students were divided into two groups. During an instructional discussion about the topic, one group was confronted with their alternative conceptions…

Scientific concepts of learning and the brain are relevant for biology teachers in two ways: Firstly, the topic is an object of instruction (e.g., long-term potentiation). Secondly, biology teachers must guide their students towards sustainable learning. Consequently, their own understanding of learning and the brain has an especially far-reaching…

Psychological research on learning has brought forth many insights that are relevant for teachers (for example, knowledge about learning strategies). However, teachers sometimes have intuitive fragmentary knowledge that is partly incorrect. Such knowledge hinders the acquisition of psychological knowledge. Tried-and-tested interventions dealing…

Conceptual change requires learners to restructure parts of their conceptual knowledge base. Prior research has identified the fragmentation and the integration of knowledge as 2 important component processes of knowledge restructuring but remains unclear as to their relative importance and the time of their occurrence during development. Previous…

A hands-on instructional approach with medium-achieving 10th-grade students (N = 294) successfully demonstrated the achievement of a conceptual change. Two teaching variations were applied (I-1, I-2), both dealing with a hands-on gene technology lesson in an out-of-school laboratory. I-2 additionally confronted the participants with alternative…