Background: Studies in biology have shown that students perceive variation and evolution to be difficult areas to learn. This has sparked rote learning of variation and evolution concepts and is evidenced in poor performance in tests involving these concepts. Purpose: In light of the significant role of variation and evolution in a human's…

This paper analyzes Sim-Evolution, an educational simulator designed to help teachers presenting three basic principles of the theory of evolution by natural selection (TENS): the trait variation within a population, the heritability of trait variation, and the selective survival based on heritable traits. Sim-Evolution focuses on high school…

This study is part of a series of in situ design-based research investigations within a large public university in California, assessing undergraduate science instruction while distance learning. It has become increasingly important to identify sustainable learning alternatives to support online teaching and learning while integrating educational…

We investigate the way students' reasoning about evolution can be supported by drawing-based modeling. We modified the drawing-based modeling tool SimSketch to allow for modeling evolutionary processes. In three iterations of development and testing, students in lower secondary education worked on creating an evolutionary model. After each…

In this paper, we explore museum visitor learning through the examination of the engagement in narrative-making practices of school children while visiting a natural history museum. Two groups of children are given worksheets and encouraged to use their own mobile technologies to document their visits in relation to the subject of evolutionary…

In this study we aim to find out whether a training program for secondary school science teachers which was organized based on the model of Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK), could improve their individual PCK for a specific scientific issue. The Evolution Theory (ET) and the Natural Selection (NS) were chosen as the scientific issues of…

An online curriculum about biological evolution was designed to promote increased student content knowledge and evidentiary reasoning. A feasibility study was conducted with 77 rural high school biology students who learned with the online biological evolution unit. Data sources included the Biological Evolution Assessment Measure (BEAM), an…

Two sections of Genetics and Evolution were taught by one instructor. One group (the fully flipped section) had the entire class period devoted to active learning (with background material that had to be watched before class), and the other group (the partially flipped section) had just a portion of class time spent on active learning (with the…

Despite the centrality of evolution to the study of biology, the pedagogical methods employed to teach the subject are often instructor-centered and rarely embedded in every topic throughout the curriculum. In addition, students' prior beliefs about evolution are often dismissed rather than incorporated into the classroom. In this article we…

The increase in publications presenting molecular evolutionary analyses and the availability of comparative sequence data through resources such as NCBI's GenBank underscore the necessity of providing undergraduates with hands-on sequence analysis skills in an evolutionary context. This need is particularly acute given that students have been…

This study investigated seventh grade learners' decision making about genetic engineering concepts and applications. A social network analyses supported by technology tracked changes in student understanding with a focus on social and conceptual influences. Results indicated that several social and conceptual mechanisms potentially affected how…

Educators are increasingly looking to Information and Communications Technology (ICT) as a means of enhancing student learning. The New Life Sciences (NLS) is a domain where complex and often abstract concepts must be communicated from a scientific perspective and understood by the student in terms of their underlying implications. This…

Explores the effects of students' inquiry during a technology-supported unit of evolution and natural selection on their beliefs about the nature of science. Shows that the inconsistency of individual responses undermines the assumption that students have stable, coherent epistemological frameworks. Indicates differences between student talk…

Introduces MacClade which is a Macintosh-based software package that uses the techniques of cladistic analysis to explore evolutionary patterns. Describes a novel and effective exercise that allows undergraduate biology majors to test a hypothesis about behavioral evolution in insects. (Contains 13 references.) (Author/YDS)

Explores how students' epistemological ideas about the nature of science interact with their conceptual understanding of a particular domain as reflected in written explanations for an event of natural selection constructed by groups of high school students through a technology-supported curriculum on evolution. Highlights the need for an…