Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in our understanding of the social behaviour of microbes. Here, we take advantage of these developments to present an undergraduate laboratory exercise that uses the cooperative flocculating behaviour of yeast ("Saccharomyces sp.") to introduce the concept of inclusive fitness and teach the…

The main aim of our research was to determine whether the teacher is one of the factors influencing students' perception of biology as a school subject. The study also aimed to identify the influence of certain other factors in this regard, specifically: students' gender and place of residence, the number of biology teachers who have taught the…

For science learning to be successful, students must develop attitudes toward support future engagement with challenging social issues related to science. This is especially important for increasing participation of students from underrepresented populations. This study investigated how participation in inquiry-based biology laboratory classes…

The "droso4schools" project aims to introduce the fruit fly "Drosophila" as a powerful modern teaching tool to convey curriculum-relevant specifications in biology lessons. Flies are easy and cheap to breed and have been at the forefront of biology research for a century, providing unique conceptual understanding of biology and…

How effective is training frogs to jump? This is perhaps the most frequent question in biology that is subjected to statistical analysis: does a treatment make a difference? One can examine whether there is indeed a training effect, by first assuming the opposite. That is, the authors assume that training has no effect on the mean distance jumped.…

Inquiry learning is a widely recognized method for fostering inquiry competence in science education. Nevertheless, there is discussion about how to best support students while working on inquiry tasks (in this case: experiments on causal relationships). To identify the kind of support students need in order to design experiments in upper grades,…

In this article, the authors consider the possibility that groups could be different, because of the different conditions of a factor. This is as far as the analysis can extend: the consideration is restricted to groups characterized by the different category of the factor being considered. In many biological experiments, the factor considered may…

In order to challenge our undergraduate students' enduring misconception that plants, animals, and fungi must be "advanced" and that other eukaryotes traditionally called protists must be "primitive," we have developed a 24-hour take-home guided inquiry and investigation of live Physarum cultures. The experiment replicates…

Introducing research in undergraduate biology studies may contribute to creating research vocations and generate the idea that science may influence all aspects of common life. However, laboratory practices are too often disconnected from current investigations and rarely address real-life questions that are really interesting for students.…

The aim of this study was to evaluate the effects of living animals on pupils' intrinsic motivation and knowledge. Various studies from the late 1970s and 1980s stress the high effectiveness of authentic learning experiences in pupils' knowledge acquisition. However, there are only few current empirical studies on this topic. The research question…

This field experiment is designed to test for despotic behavior in Mallards ("Anas platyrhynchos"), and to examine how ducks distribute themselves relative to their resources. Students present Mallards with food patches differing in profitability in order to examine whether ducks distribute themselves ideal freely or ideal despotically. Students…

Variations in science lab design can differentially impact student learning. Quantification of these differential impacts can be used in modeling--an approach we term "optimal lab design." In this study we estimated relative influences of six characteristics of lab design on students' attitudes toward science labs in three different…

Presents an experiment to compare the effectiveness of 95% ethanol to 20% bleach as disinfectants using t-tests for the statistical analysis of the data. Reports that bleach is a better disinfectant. Discusses the statistical and practical significance of the results. (JRH)

Two statistical tools, the Chi-square and standard error approaches, are compared for use in Mendelian genetics experiments. Although the Chi-square technique is more often used, the standard error approach is to be preferred for both research investigations and student experiments. (BB)

Describes the statistical test of chi-square analysis. Explains how this test can be used in biology instruction. Examples from blood typing are used. (PR)