A key tenet of the nature of science is that "knowledge, although reliable and durable, is never absolute or certain" and is subject to change with the accrual of new bodies of evidence (Lederman "et al." 2002). Similarly, pedagogical choices grounded in scientific teaching would also be expected to be modified, refined, and…

In an introductory biology course, undergraduate students are expected to become familiar with, and be able to use, hundreds of new terms to navigate the complex ideas in biology. And this is just in the introductory course! Juxtapose this student situation with the common frustration expressed by biologists that there is "just too much…

The importance of metacognition in the process of learning is an old idea that can be traced from Socrates' questioning methods to Dewey's twentieth-century stance that one learns more from reflecting on one's experiences than from the actual experiences themselves (Dewey, 1933). What is more recent is the coining of the term "metacognition" and…

The biology education community focuses a great deal of time and energy on issues of "what" students should be learning in the modern age of biology and then probing the extent to which students are learning these things. There has been increased focus over time on the "how" of teaching, with attention to questioning the…

To promote inquiry-based learning, the authors integrate the anatomy of a scientific journal article into their secondary science curriculum. In this article, they present three classroom activities used to teach students about the function and format of scientific journal articles. The first focuses on journal article figures, the second on…

Active-learning strategies are increasingly being integrated into college-level science courses to make material more accessible to all students and to improve learning outcomes. One active-learning pedagogy, case-based learning (CBL), was developed as a way to both enhance engagement in the material and to accommodate diverse learning styles.…