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Research into how and what families learn in science museums and other informal science learning settings suggests that parent-child interactions play an important role in shaping children’s learning experiences. Our exploratory case study set out to discover and analyse learning happening within family groups during a visit to a traditional museum natural history gallery. Research methods were influenced by a growing body of literature that looks for learning in family visitor talk. Conversations of 18 families were recorded as they explored a gallery after being introduced to six learning games which fostered a ‘climate of inquiry’ and which were designed to spark family dialogue. Our findings indicate that families adopt a range of interactional approaches for building meaning together in a museum gallery. These approaches fell along a spectrum that varied according to the level of co-investigation and co-operation between group members. We suggest that family learning could be supported in informal learning contexts through simple, low-cost learning strategies that encourage dialogue and co-investigatory behaviours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In England at present, an intense debate is raging about teacher education, triggered by a set of reform proposals from the UK government. I have been involved in university-based biology teacher education for nearly 20 years, and I find it noteworthy that stakeholders' responses to the proposals are almost unanimously critical; those stakeholders include subject associations, unions and teacher education providers, including universities and school-based providers. [Extracted from the article]

Early in the vaccination programme, several governments halted roll-out of the so-called Oxford vaccine. If you don't trust the people who are telling you about Covid-19, your perception of disease risk is lower; if you don't trust what they are saying about vaccination, your perception of vaccination risk is higher. The number of deaths was no more than would be expected from "natural causes" (Spiegelhalter [5]), and the chance of dying from Covid-19 was (and still is) much higher than the chance of dying from a blood clot after vaccination. [Extracted from the article]

Even in the largest of cities, plants are probably the most common living organisms we see, and yet plant blindness and children's recognition of plants as living things remains an important focus, also discussed in this issue. When looking back at the Covid-19 pandemic in years to come, our children and grandchildren are likely to ask why we didn't see it coming. Plant scientists are responsible for ensuring that food and fuel supplies are sustainable, for protecting biodiversity, and for providing insight into some of the impacts of climate change. [Extracted from the article]

The scientists who worked on these vaccines are an inspiration for others and demonstrate why biology and biological education are both so essential. In Sarah Gilbert's lab at the University of Oxford, scientists had already engineered a modified chimpanzee cold virus as the basis for a vaccine against other diseases, giving her a head-start in the development of a vaccine to Covid-19. The so-called Pfizer vaccine is equally impressive, being the first large-scale mRNA vaccine, causing human cells to generate harmless Covid-19 antigens, which then trigger an immune response. [Extracted from the article]

This crisis highlights the importance of biologists, whose advice is helping governments to save lives, to keep their health services functioning, and to provide clarity to the general public, when things seem very uncertain. Not only that, it has provided an opportunity to understand the importance of scientific process, and evidence-based decision-making. Evidence-based decision-making in classrooms, lecture halls and teaching laboratories is essential, if we are to build our students' understanding of biology, and generate the epidemiologists, doctors and virologists of the future. [Extracted from the article]