Genetic variation is historically challenging for undergraduate students to master, potentially due to its grounding in both evolution and genetics. Traditionally, student expertise in genetic variation has been evaluated using Key Concepts. However, Cognitive Construals may add to a more nuanced picture of students' developing expertise. Here, we…

Two foundational concepts in biology education are 1) offspring are not identical to their parents, and 2) organisms undergo changes throughout their lives. These concepts are included in both international and U.S. curricular standards. Research in psychology has shown that children often have difficulty understanding these concepts, as they are…

Reasoning about visual representations in science requires the ability to control one's attention, inhibit attention to irrelevant or incorrect information, and hold information in mind while manipulating it actively--all aspects of the limited-capacity cognitive system described as humans' executive functions. This article describes pedagogical…

Reasoning about visual representations in science requires the ability to control one's attention, inhibit attention to irrelevant or incorrect information, and hold information in mind while manipulating it actively--all aspects of the limited capacity cognitive system described as humans' Executive Functions (EFs) (see Diamond, 2002). This…

The idea that characteristics acquired by an organism during its lifetime can be inherited by offspring and result in evolution is a substantial impediment to student understanding of evolution. In the current study, we performed a preliminary examination of how acquiring physical changes in a question prompt may differentially cue intuitive and…

We highlight some important conceptual issues that biologists should take into account when teaching evolutionary biology or communicating it to the public. We first present conclusions from conceptual development research on how particular human intuitions, namely design teleology and psychological essentialism, influence the understanding of…

Research in genetics and genomics is advancing at a fast pace, and thus keeping up with the most recent findings and conclusions can be very challenging. At the same time these recent findings and conclusions have made necessary a reconceptualization of genes and heredity, both in science and in science education, beyond the mostly gene-centred…