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Systems thinking is considered an important skill when teaching biology and sustainable development in the 21st century. The key to understanding biodiversity and thus sustainability in biology is understanding reproduction as a phenomenon. The aim of this study is to analyse student teachers’ systems thinking levels regarding sustainability in connection with reproduction, biodiversity and sustainable development. Second-year primary school student teachers from one Finnish university (N = 174) participated in a questionnaire, and their open-ended answers were categorized using content analysis. The results indicate that most of the student teachers had a relatively low level of systems thinking concerning sustainable development and its relation to the concepts of biodiversity and reproduction. The study also showed that student teachers with higher interest towards biology had a more sophisticated level of systems thinking. For developing sustainability understanding, teaching focusing on the specific systems thinking skills concerning processing and understanding of wholes is crucial.

This study aimed to investigate what kind of conceptions pre-service teachers have concerning the issues they find important in teaching and management of biology in order to be able to provide adequate learning to Finnish elementary school pupils. A questionnaire survey was conducted over three years in a Finnish university. Answers were subjected to content-based analysis. As background information, the pre-service teachers’ self-evaluation estimations of their biological content knowledge and management were measured.The important issues mentioned by pre-service teachers were mainly knowledge and skills, also experiences, attitudes, teaching, and some other matters concerning the Finnish National Core Curricula were mentioned. The conceptions of pre-service teachers were discussed in connection with subject content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge. The implications for science educators were also presented.

Students’ and student teachers’ decreasing interest in and knowledge of science are, according to many national and international assessments, alarming trends in the Nordic countries. This quantitative and qualitative study of student teachers’ knowledge of core concepts and processes in ecology confirms the low level of student teachers’ understanding of these issues, although a majority consider these issues to be basic knowledge for their teacher competencies. Many of the student teachers did not know what biosphere or succession is. They also had difficulties in explaining what a seed contains and what its role is in the plant’s lifecycle. Several student teachers also had difficulties to explain why photosynthesis is important and how it works. The increasing ecological and environmental illiteracy is discussed as one of the implications for teacher education.

A landscape is an experienced environment, which can be perceived by senses and feelings or through cognition processes. The background hypotheses of this study comprise the idea that the landscape which somebody would like to conserve is, in one way or another, important and valuable to her or him. The person undoubtedly has positive experiences and images of this environment. The present study used students’ drawings to analyze their conceptions of the landscape. The conceptions differ both in content and in quality and they are dependent on age and experiences. The aim of this study was to analyze the drawings of a group of Finnish pupils (N=324) in basic education to find out the landscape they would like to conserve and to find out their relation to the environment. Pupils from grades 1-2, 5-6 and 8-9 participated. The results show that the nature landscape was the most common one in all age groups. In the nature landscapes the following issues were usually present: vegetation, especially trees, often also flowers (in girls’ drawings), water elements, the sky and the sun. Furthermore, dominating contents in the nature landscapes were water elements, like creeks, rivers, small lakes, lakes or the sea. Many of the nature drawings contained forest. One third of the landscapes represented a built environment, the so-called cultural landscape, where the nature landscape had been more or less changed by human activity The number of these built landscapes did not vary markedly between the three age groups. The third of the main categories, a landscape where human beings were physically present in the landscapes, was the most infrequent and was relatively most often drawn by pupils in grades 5-6. The boys valued more landscapes modified by human activity compared to the landscapes valued by girls. In conclusion: the landscapes in the drawings of these Finnish pupils in basic education were strongly connected to the nature and this result is in line to the original Finnish definition of the landscape.

Alarming trends in science in Nordic schools, indicating a diminishing interest among students, a lack of knowledge and competence among teachers as well as a decreasing amount of science in teacher education sparked this study of student teachers in Denmark, Finland and Sweden. This quantitative and qualitative study of teacher students’ views of human biology made it clear that human biology is seen as basic teacher knowledge by a majority of the students, in Finland in particular. The student teachers’ level of knowledge in human biology is very low. They have difficulties in explaining basic body functions, for example in relation to the human blood circulation system. They lack understanding of how various body organs work together, a fact that makes teaching and pupil guidance more difficult. Nordic teacher education should provide more time for diagnosing and developing student teachers’ critical and scientific thinking skills as well as problem-based science teaching.

This research was carried out in connection with “The Finnish-Russian Country School Project”. The aim is to compare Finnish and Russian pupils’ values in their drawings of the landscape (n=946) they want to conserve, and to pay attention to the animals they draw. The pupils were 7–15 years old. The landscapes were classified by the variables (country, age, sex), and analysed according to landscape type. The most prevailing landscape was nature (82%). The existence of animals was few in species; but there were more animals in the Russian drawings. The most frequently drawn groups were the“wave birds” and mammals. The Russians often presented the forest animals whereas the Finns drew the domestic species. With increasing age, the frequency of the animals decreased clearly in the Russian landscapes. A similar age distribution was not seen in the Finnish drawings. In conclusion, the animals were well placed in their ecological environment, indicating children’s good understanding of the natural habitat they were drawing.