scholarly journals A evolução como eixo integrador das ciências biológicas: uma unidade didática no contexto do ensino de biologia

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-47
Author(s):  
Pedro Leonardo Guarilha Colli ◽  
Mariana Aparecida Bologna Soares de Andrade ◽  
Vinícius Colussi Bastos
Keyword(s):  
Biological Sciences ◽  
Meaningful Learning ◽  
First Year ◽  
Biology Teaching ◽  
Biological Phenomena ◽  
Teaching Unit ◽  
Darwinian Paradigm

Resumo: Estudos realizados nas últimas décadas indicam que a Biologia vem sendo ensinada de forma fragmentada e descontextualizada nas escolas brasileiras. Dentre os fatores apontados como causa desta tendência, destaca-se a negligência em relação ao ensino de Evolução, que raramente é tratado como o eixo integrador das Ciências Biológicas. Partindo disso, este estudo propõe uma Unidade de Ensino Potencialmente Significativa (UEPS) para a promoção da aprendizagem das ideias fundamentais à formação do pensamento evolutivo e compreensão dos fenômenos e mecanismos biológicos de maneira integrada e contextualizada. A UEPS construída aborda a Evolução por meio das cinco principais ideias evolucionistas do paradigma darwiniano e é sugerida para ser utilizada no primeiro ano do Ensino Médio.Palavras-chave: Ensino de Evolução; Didática da Biologia; Aprendizagem Significativa; UEPS. Evolution as a unifying axis of biological sciences: a teaching unit in the context of biology teachingAbstract: Studies carried out in the last decades indicate that Biology has been taught in a fragmented and decontextualized way in Brazilian schools. Among the factors pointed out as the cause of this trend, the negligence related to the teaching of Evolution stands out, which is rarely treated as the unifying axis of the Biological Sciences. Based on these understandings, this study proposes a Potentially Meaningful Teaching Unit (PMTU) to promote the learning of fundamental ideas for the formation of evolutionary thinking and understanding of biological phenomena and mechanisms in an integrated and contextualized way. The PMTU developed addresses Evolution through the five main evolutionary ideas of the Darwinian paradigm and is suggested to be used in the first year of High School.Keywords: Teaching of Evolution; Biology Teaching; Meaningful Learning; PMTU. 

The “core principles” of physiology: what should students understand?

2009 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joel Michael ◽  
Harold Modell ◽  
Jenny McFarland ◽  
William Cliff
Keyword(s):  
Biological Sciences ◽  
Assessment Instrument ◽  
The Core ◽  
Biological Phenomena ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Constituent Component ◽  
Thinking Tools ◽  
Student Attention

The explosion of knowledge in all of the biological sciences, and specifically in physiology, has created a growing problem for educators. There is more to know than students can possibly learn. Thus, difficult choices have to be made about what we expect students to master. One approach to making the needed decisions is to consider those “core principles” that provide the thinking tools for understanding all biological phenomena. We identified a list of “core principles” that appear to apply to all aspects of physiology and unpacked them into their constituent component ideas. While such a list does not define the content for a physiology course, it does provide a guideline for selecting the topics on which to focus student attention. This list of “core principles” also offers a starting point for developing an assessment instrument to be used in determining if students have mastered the important unifying ideas of physiology.

scholarly journals A Biology Core Concept Instrument (BCCI) to Teach and Assess Student Conceptual Understanding

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. ar46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tawnya L. Cary ◽  
Caroline J. Wienhold ◽  
Janet Branchaw
Keyword(s):  
Student Performance ◽  
Conceptual Understanding ◽  
Scoring System ◽  
Interrater Reliability ◽  
Student Understanding ◽  
First Year ◽  
Core Concept ◽  
Biological Phenomenon ◽  
Biological Phenomena ◽  
Core Concepts

Instruments for teaching and assessing student understanding of the five core concepts in biology from Vision and Change are needed. We developed four Biology Core ­Concept Instruments (BCCIs) that teach and assess students’ ability to describe a concept in their own words, identify concepts represented in biological phenomena, and make connections between concepts. The BCCI includes a narrative, followed by a series of 10 true-false/identify (TF/I) and three open-ended questions. The TF/I questions are aligned with Cary and Branchaw’s Conceptual Elements Framework and were iteratively developed with feedback from biology experts and student performance and feedback obtained during think-aloud interviews. A component scoring system was developed to discriminate between a student’s ability to apply and identify each core concept from his or her ability to make connections between concepts. We field-tested the BCCIs ( n = 152–191) with students in a first-year course focused on learning the five core concepts in biology and collected evidence of interrater reliability (α = 0.70) and item validity. With component scoring, we identified examples in which students were able to identify concepts singularly, but not make connections between concepts, or were better able to apply concepts to one biological phenomenon than another. Identifying these nuanced differences in learning can guide instruction to improve students’ conceptual understanding.

scholarly journals Common Origins of Diverse Misconceptions: Cognitive Principles and the Development of Biology Thinking

2012 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 209-215 ◽  
Author(s):  
John D. Coley ◽  
Kimberly D. Tanner
Keyword(s):  
Biological Sciences ◽  
Cognitive Psychology ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Biology Teaching ◽  
Biological Analysis ◽  
The World ◽  
Cognitive Principles ◽  
Biological Concepts

Many ideas in the biological sciences seem especially difficult to understand, learn, and teach successfully. Our goal in this feature is to explore how these difficulties may stem not from the complexity or opacity of the concepts themselves, but from the fact that they may clash with informal, intuitive, and deeply held ways of understanding the world that have been studied for decades by psychologists. We give a brief overview of the field of developmental cognitive psychology. Then, in each of the following sections, we present a number of common challenges faced by students in the biological sciences. These may be in the form of misconceptions, biases, or simply concepts that are difficult to learn and teach, and they occur at all levels of biological analysis (molecular, cellular, organismal, population, and ecosystem). We then introduce the notion of a cognitive construal and discuss specific examples of how these cognitive principles may explain what makes some misconceptions so alluring and some biological concepts so challenging for undergraduates. We will argue that seemingly unrelated misconceptions may have common origins in a single underlying cognitive construal. These ideas emerge from our own ongoing cross-disciplinary conversation, and we think that expanding this conversation to include other biological scientists and educators, as well as other cognitive scientists, could have significant utility in improving biology teaching and learning.

scholarly journals Undergraduate Biology Students’ Teleological and Essentialist Misconceptions

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 135 ◽  
Author(s):  
Florian Stern ◽  
Kostas Kampourakis ◽  
Catherine Huneault ◽  
Patricia Silveira ◽  
Andreas Müller
Keyword(s):  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Developmental Psychology ◽  
Biology Education ◽  
First Year ◽  
Test Results ◽  
Natural Phenomena ◽  
Future Directions ◽  
Biology Students ◽  
Psychological Essentialism ◽  
Biological Phenomena

Research in developmental psychology has shown that deeply-rooted, intuitive ways of thinking, such as design teleology and psychological essentialism, impact children’s scientific explanations about natural phenomena. Similarly, biology education researchers have found that students often hold inaccurate conceptions about natural phenomena, which often relate to these intuitions. In order to further investigate the relation between students’ conceptions and intuitions, we conducted a study with 93 first year undergraduate students in biology. They were asked to express their level of agreement or disagreement with six misconception statements and to explain their choices in a two-tier test. Results showed a tendency for students to agree with teleological and essentialist misconceptions. However, no association was found between students’ teleological and essentialist conceptions as expressed in their agreement or disagreement with the various misconception statements. Moreover, we found evidence of a variable consistency across students’ answers depending on the misconception considered, which indicates that item features and contexts may have an effect on students’ answers. All together, these findings provide evidence for considerable persistence of teleological and essentialist misconceptions among students. We suggest future directions for thinking, studying, and analyzing students’ conceptions about biological phenomena.

scholarly journals Integration of Information and Scientific Literacy: Promoting Literacy in Undergraduates

2010 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 536-542 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason A. Porter ◽  
Kevin C. Wolbach ◽  
Catherine B. Purzycki ◽  
Leslie A. Bowman ◽  
Eva Agbada ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Biological Sciences ◽  
Information Literacy ◽  
Scientific Literacy ◽  
Information Science ◽  
Scientific Literature ◽  
First Year ◽  
Student Responses ◽  
Research Libraries ◽  
Academic Advancement ◽  
Undergraduate Experience

The Association of College and Research Libraries recommends incorporating information literacy (IL) skills across university and college curricula, for the goal of developing information literate graduates. Congruent with this goal, the Departments of Biological Sciences and Information Science developed an integrated IL and scientific literacy (SL) exercise for use in a first-year biology course. Students were provided the opportunity to access, retrieve, analyze, and evaluate primary scientific literature. By the completion of this project, student responses improved concerning knowledge and relevance of IL and SL skills. This project exposes students to IL and SL early in their undergraduate experience, preparing them for future academic advancement.

Conceptual Assessment in the Biological Sciences: a National Science Foundation-sponsored workshop

2007 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 389-391 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joel Michael
Keyword(s):  
Biological Sciences ◽  
Conceptual Understanding ◽  
National Science Foundation ◽  
Meaningful Learning ◽  
Biology Teachers ◽  
University Of Colorado ◽  
Education Community ◽  
National Science ◽  
Biological Concepts ◽  
The University

Twenty-one biology teachers from a variety of disciplines (genetics, ecology, physiology, biochemistry, etc.) met at the University of Colorado to begin discussions about approaches to assessing students' conceptual understanding of biology. We considered what is meant by a “concept” in biology, what the important biological concepts might be, and how to go about developing assessment items about these concepts. We also began the task of creating a community of biologists interested in facilitating meaningful learning in biology. Input from the physiology education community is essential in the process of developing conceptual assessments for physiology.

scholarly journals Time-to-Credit Gender Inequities of First-Year PhD Students in the Biological Sciences

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. ar4 ◽  
Author(s):  
David F. Feldon ◽  
James Peugh ◽  
Michelle A. Maher ◽  
Josipa Roksa ◽  
Colby Tofel-Grehl
Keyword(s):  
Biological Sciences ◽  
Workforce Development ◽  
Degree Attainment ◽  
First Year ◽  
Gender Inequalities ◽  
National Cohort ◽  
Underrepresentation Of Women ◽  
Scientific Workforce ◽  
Number Of Individuals ◽  
Academic Year

Equitable gender representation is an important aspect of scientific workforce development to secure a sufficient number of individuals and a diversity of perspectives. Biology is the most gender equitable of all scientific fields by the marker of degree attainment, with 52.5% of PhDs awarded to women. However, equitable rates of degree completion do not translate into equitable attainment of faculty or postdoctoral positions, suggesting continued existence of gender inequalities. In a national cohort of 336 first-year PhD students in the biological sciences (i.e., microbiology, cellular biology, molecular biology, developmental biology, and genetics) from 53 research institutions, female participants logged significantly more research hours than males and were significantly more likely than males to attribute their work hours to the demands of their assigned projects over the course of the academic year. Despite this, males were 15% more likely to be listed as authors on published journal articles, indicating inequality in the ratio of time to credit. Given the cumulative advantage that accrues for students who publish early in their graduate careers and the central role that scholarly productivity plays in academic hiring decisions, these findings collectively point to a major potential source of persisting underrepresentation of women on university faculties in these fields.

scholarly journals Western Faculty Profile: Dr. Robert Cumming

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Amina Inaara Kassam
Keyword(s):  
Biological Sciences ◽  
Brain Metabolism ◽  
Career Path ◽  
Assistant Professor ◽  
Academic Affairs ◽  
Antioxidant Defenses ◽  
First Year ◽  
Undergraduate Biology ◽  
University Of Toronto ◽  
The University

Dr. Robert Cumming is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Western University. He completed his BSc and Ph.D. at the University of Toronto and now teaches several undergraduate Biology courses. His research focuses on the changes in brain metabolism and antioxidant defenses that occur with age. Amina Kassam, a first-year representative of the Academic Affairs Committee for WURJHNS, interviewed Dr. Cumming to learn more about his career path and relay his advice for students who wish to pursue research.

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