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This article focuses on the dilemmas science educators face when having to introduce Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) to science student teachers in a predominantly paper-based distance learning environment. It draws on the premise that science education is bound by the Nature of Science (NOS), and by the Nature of Scientific Inquiry (NOSI). Furthermore, science educators' own PCK, and the limitations of a predominantly paper-based distance education (DE) model of delivery are challenges that they have to face when introducing PCK and authentic inquiry-based learning experiences. It deprives them and their students from optimal engagement in a science-oriented community of practice, and leaves little opportunity to establish flourishing communities of inquiry. This study carried out a contextual analysis of the tutorial material to assess the PCK that the student teachers had been exposed to. This comprised the ideas of a community of inquiry, a community of science, the conceptualization of PCK, scientific inquiry, and the 5E Instructional Model of the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study. The analysis confirmed that the lecturers had a good understanding of NOS, NOSI and science process skills, but found it difficult to design interventions to optimize the PCK development of students through communities of inquiry. Paper-based tutorials are ideal to share theory, policies and practices, but fail to monitor the engagement of learners in communities of inquiry. The article concludes with a number of suggestions to address the apparent lack of impact power of the paper-based mode of delivery, specifically in relation to inquiry-based teaching and learning (IBTL).

Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) introduce research leading to skills acquisition and increased persistence in the major. CUREs generate enthusiasm and interest in doing science and serve as an intervention to increase equity and participation of historically marginalized students. In the second-semester laboratory of our introductory sequence for biology and marine science majors at California State University Monterey Bay (CSUMB), instructors updated and implemented a field-based CURE. The goals of the CURE were to promote increased scientific identity, systems thinking, and equity at a Hispanic-serving institution (HSI). Through the CURE, students engaged in scientific writing through a research paper with a focus on information literacy, critical thinking, and quantitative reasoning as important elements of thinking like a scientist. Course exams also revealed that students showed gains in their ability to evaluate a new biological system using systems thinking. More broadly, because such field-based experiences demonstrate equity gains among Latinx students and a much greater sense of scientific identity, they may have impacts beyond introductory biology including in students' personal and professional lives.

The topic of "teacher professionalism" is one of the most crucial ones in quality education research. It has a potential to generate results that could inform and hence enhance the practice in classrooms. Thus, research in this field needs reliable instruments to measure the professional knowledge of our teachers to be able to generate reliable results for our research problems. Not many instruments have been developed with regard to this topic. At the same time, an adequate validation of the instrument developed is often missing (Schilling & Hill, 2007). Hence, in a bigger project "ProwiN" (German acronym for professional knowledge of science teachers), test instruments for measuring science teachers' pedagogical, pedagogical content and content knowledge (PK, PCK, and CK) were developed for the subjects biology, chemistry and physics. The present study tested the validity of some of these items which were used to measure the pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) of biology teachers. These items focused on measuring teachers' professional knowledge by analyzing 1) teachers' "knowledge about student understanding" (or lack of understanding) of several topics in biology and 2) "knowledge about instructional strategies" like the use of models or experiments. The content validity of these instruments was examined by think-aloud interviews with American and German Biology teachers (N = 11). This study shows a high content validity for these items. Furthermore, this paper demonstrates the scope for adapting the conceptual framework of these items to measure biology teachers' PCK in other countries.

This study examined comparability of student scores obtained from computerized and paper-and-pencil formats of the large-scale statewide end-of-course (EOC) examinations in the two subject areas of Algebra and Biology. Evidence in support of comparability of computerized and paper-based tests was sought by examining scale scores, item parameter estimates, test characteristic curves, test information functions, Rasch ability estimates at the content domain level, and the equivalence of the construct. Overall, the results support the comparability of computerized and paper-based tests at the item-level, subtest-level and whole test-level in both subject areas. No evidence was found to suggest that the administration mode changed the construct being measured. (Contains 5 tables and 8 figures.)

This paper provides a descriptive content analysis of biology education research papers published in eight major academic journals indexed in Social Science Citation Index [SSCI] of Thomson Reuters® from 1997 to 2014. Total of 1376 biology education research [BER] papers were examined. The findings indicated that most of the papers were published in the JBE and IJSE, and frequently studied topics were environment and ecology, genetics and biotechnology, and animal form and function. The findings were also indicated that learning, teaching and attitudes was in the forefront as the frequently investigated subject matters, undergraduate and secondary school students were mostly preferred as sample group and sample size mostly varies between 31-100 and 101-300. In addition, it was found out that interactive qualitative research designs were mostly preferred. Besides, that single data collection tool was generally used and this data collection tool included questionnaires, interviews and documents. Finally, frequency/percentage tables, central tendency measures, statistical analysis such as t-test and ANOVA/ANCOVA and content analysis were commonly used as data analysis.

Authorship of peer-reviewed journal articles and abstracts has become the primary currency and reward unit in academia. Such a reward is crucial for students and postdocs who are often under-compensated and thus highly value authorship as an incentive. While numerous scientific and publishing organizations have written guidelines for determining author qualifications and author order, there remains much ambiguity when it comes to how these criteria are weighed by research faculty. Here, we sought to provide some initial insight on how faculty view the relative importance of 11 criteria for scientific authorship. We distributed an online survey to 564 biomedical engineering, biology, and bioengineering faculty members at 10 research institutions across the United States. The response rate was approximately 18%, resulting in a final sample of 102 respondents. Results revealed an agreement on some criteria, such as time spent conducting experiments, but there was a lack of agreement regarding the role of funding procurement. This study provides quantitative assessments of how faculty members in the biosciences evaluate authorship criteria. We discuss the implications of these findings for researchers, especially new graduate students, to help navigate the discrepancy between official policies for authorship and the contributions that faculty truly value.

Question-asking is a basic skill, required for the development of scientific thinking. However, the way in which science lessons are conducted does not usually stimulate question-asking by students. To make students more familiar with the scientific inquiry process, we developed a curriculum in developmental biology based on research papers suitable for high-school students. Since a scientific paper poses a research question, demonstrates the events that led to the answer, and poses new questions, we attempted to examine the effect of studying through research papers on students' ability to pose questions. Students were asked before, during, and after instruction what they found interesting to know about embryonic development. In addition, we monitored students' questions, which were asked orally during the lessons. Questions were scored according to three categories: properties, comparisons, and causal relationships. We found that before learning through research papers, students tend to ask only questions of the properties category. In contrast, students tend to pose questions that reveal a higher level of thinking and uniqueness during or following instruction with research papers. This change was not observed during or following instruction with a textbook. We suggest that learning through research papers may be one way to provide a stimulus for question-asking by high-school students and results in higher thinking levels and uniqueness. (Contains 3 tables.)

Science instructors are increasingly incorporating teaching techniques that help students develop core competencies such as critical-thinking and communication skills. These core competencies are pillars of career readiness that prepare undergraduate students to successfully transition to continuing education or the workplace, whatever the field. Course-based undergraduate research experiences that culminate in written research papers can be effective at developing critical-thinking and communication skills but are challenging to implement as class size (and student-to-instructor ratio) grows. We developed a hierarchical mentoring program in which graduate student mentors guided groups of four to five undergraduate students through the scientific process in an upper-level ecology course. Program effectiveness was evaluated by grading final research papers (including previous year papers, before the program was implemented) and surveys (comparing to a course that did not implement the program). Results indicated that primary benefits of hierarchical mentoring were improvements in perceived and demonstrated ability in data analysis and interpretation, leading to a median increase in paper score of ~10% on a 100-point scale. Future directions indicated by our study were a need to incorporate more approaches (e.g., low-stakes writing exercises) and resources into a revised program to improve outcomes for students whose primary language is not English.

Two significant benefits derived from reading and discussing classic scientific papers in undergraduate biology courses are 1) providing students with the realistic perspective that science is an ongoing process (rather than a set of inarguable facts) and 2) deepening the students' understanding of physiological processes. A classic paper that is useful in both of these regards is by I. E. Lawton and N. B. Schwartz ("A circadian rhythm of luteinizing hormone secretion in ovariectomized rats." "Am J Physiol" 214: 213-217, 1968). The primary objective of the study is to determine whether tonic (pulsatile) secretion of luteinizing hormone (LH) from the pituitary gland exhibits a circadian rhythm. While this hypothesis seems relatively straightforward, its in vivo investigation necessitates an awareness of the multitude of factors, in addition to the circadian clock, that can influence plasma LH levels (and a consideration of how to control for these factors in the experimental design). Furthermore, discussion of the historical context in which the study was conducted (i.e., before the pulsatile nature of LH secretion had been discovered) provides students with the realistic perspective that science is not a set of facts but rather a systematic series of attempts by scientists to understand reality (a perspective that is difficult to convey using a traditional textbook alone). A review of the historical context in which the study was conducted, and a series of discovery learning questions are included to facilitate classroom discussions and to help deepen students' understanding of the complex nature of pituitary hormone regulation. (Contains 1 figure and 1 table.)

DNA microarray technology is revolutionizing biological science. DNA microarrays (also called DNA chips) allow simultaneous screening of many genes for changes in expression between different cells. Now researchers can obtain information about genes in days or weeks that used to take months or years. The paper activity described in this article allows students to visualize how cells grown under different conditions would be analyzed using a DNA microarray. This simple microarray experiment involves looking for differences in gene expression of seedlings grown under two conditions: One set of seedlings receives full light and the other set germinates completely in the dark. This activity also reinforces concepts related to DNA structure, transcription, and experimental design. (Contains 5 figures.)

The intersection of art and science is a space useful not only to communicate scientific concepts to the general public but also to allow those of us studying biology in depth to view our work in a different light. I myself enjoy playing with the universality of anatomy, that is its bits and pieces that compose every human being. In mixing these with an array of mediums, colours, and textures, I hope to evoke a multiplicity of emotions in the viewer.

Open access (OA) publishing, whereby authors, their institutions, or their granting bodies pay or provide a repository through which peer-reviewed work is available online for free, is championed as a model to increase the number of citations per paper and disseminate results widely, especially to researchers in developing countries. We compared the number of citations of OA and non-OA papers in six journals and four books published since 2000 to test whether OA increases number of citations overall and increases citations made by authors in developing countries. After controlling for type of paper (e.g., review or research paper), length of paper, authors' citation profiles, number of authors per paper, and whether the author or the publisher released the paper in OA, OA had no statistically significant influence on the overall number of citations per journal paper. Journal papers were cited more frequently if the authors had published highly cited papers previously, were members of large teams of authors, or published relatively long papers, but papers were not cited more frequently if they were published in an OA source. Nevertheless, author-archived OA book chapters accrued up to eight times more citations than chapters in the same book that were not available through OA, perhaps because there is no online abstracting service for book chapters. There was also little evidence that journal papers or book chapters published in OA received more citations from authors in developing countries relative to those journal papers or book chapters not published in OA. For scholarly publications in conservation biology, only book chapters had an OA citation advantage, and OA did not increase the number of citations papers or chapters received from authors in developing countries.

We present a list of the most frequent errors in biological manuscripts written in Spanish, and we explain which are the recommended options. Our article is based on the International Codes of Nomenclature, and the guidelines of the Real Academia de la Lengua and the Council of Science Editors. We group the indications in four categories: lexical errors (e.g., English cognates); spelling (graphic accents, punctuation, font), morphology (use of prepositions) and style (linguistic economy).

Motivation: Converting the vast quantity of free-format text found in journals into a concise, structured format makes the researcher's quest for information easier. Recently, several information extraction systems have been developed that attempt to simplify the retrieval and analysis of biological and medical data. Most of this work has used the abstract alone, owing to the convenience of access and the quality of data. Abstracts are generally available through central collections with easy direct access (e.g. PubMed). The full-text papers contain more information, but are distributed across many locations (e.g. publishers' web sites, journal web sites and local repositories), making access more difficult. In this paper, we present BioRAT, a new information extraction (IE) tool, specifically designed to perform biomedical IE, and which is able to locate and analyse both abstracts and full-length papers. BioRAT is a Biological Research Assistant for Text mining, and incorporates a document search ability with domain-specific IE., Results: We show first, that BioRAT performs as well as existing systems, when applied to abstracts; and second, that significantly more information is available to BioRAT through the full-length papers than via the abstracts alone. Typically, less than half of the available information is extracted from the abstract, with the majority coming from the body of each paper. Overall, BioRAT recalled 20.31% of the target facts from the abstracts with 55.07% precision, and achieved 43.6% recall with 51.25% precision on full-length papers.

Critical thinking is essential in academia and the workforce. Although writing can be used as a pedagogical tool for fostering deeper subject matter understanding, increased retention, and critical thinking, relatively few science courses are writing based. This writing-based introductory science course provided an opportunity for students to learn biology content through writing while also developing critical thinking skills. In this undergraduate introductory biology course, a learning progression framework was applied to writing assignments in order to promote critical thinking. Early course assignments focused on lower-order critical thinking, including information gathering and concept connecting activities, and served as the foundation for writing an evaluative research paper (REP) that required the application and analysis of biology content knowledge within different contexts. Based on the analysis of REP assignments using standardized criteria for assessing critical thinking, students were found to significantly increase their ability to demonstrate critical thinking. Students also became more aware of their critical thinking development, made stronger connections between concepts and applications in other contexts, and displayed measurable increases in critical thinking from their first to final drafts of their papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interdisciplinary teaching and learning is an approach that synthesizes the curricular objectives and methods of two or more disciplines or subjects focusing on a specific topic or issue. While it is being increasingly implemented in universities, at lower levels of education there are still countries where science subjects are taught and learned fragmentarily. To assess the significance of the interdisciplinary approach in primary school biology teaching, the paper aims at an experimental verification of the effectiveness of this method in relation to the quality and retention of student knowledge, compared to the monodisciplinary approach to teaching and learning biology. The paper also describes a scenario for teaching a topic in which biological and geographical contents correlate. The study applied a pedagogical experiment with parallel groups. In total, 180 students attending two primary schools in the city of Novi Sad participated in the experiment and were divided into an experimental and a control group. The findings suggest that the interdisciplinary approach improved the quality and retention of student knowledge. The experimental group was more successful in completing tasks that required comprehension and practical application of knowledge. The study thus emphasizes the need for a professional curriculum development that would enhance the interdisciplinary correlation of various disciplines.

Paper Laboratory Notebooks (PLNs) have been used for centuries to document and archive the thoughts and work of inventors, scientists, students, and engineers. PLNs are the first formal means of scientific communication we teach our students and, in turn, a student's first training on cultivating and expressing scientific thinking. In the science teaching laboratory, PLNs are at the forefront and serve various purposes for students in the science laboratory curriculum, like good documentation practices and accurate record keeping. This paper discusses the reasons for switching to OneNote ELN, the criteria for selecting OneNote ELN software, how OneNote ELN was introduced and used in the course, and students' opinions on using this ELN. We successfully implemented the OneNote ELN in our General Biology Laboratory II sequence course for biology majors and nonmajor students entering the health professions. Students had a generally favorable response to using the OneNote ELN; 98% of students agreed that ELNs enabled them to keep a well-maintained laboratory notebook. Overall, student experience with ELNs was positive, with 85% of students indicating that they would recommend other future science laboratory courses they will be taking to adopt the OneNote ELN. In general, the OneNote ELN was viewed more positively in many respects than the PLNs in ease of its usage, access and organizing the notebook.

In the photographic series Baroque Biology Paper Theatre (2019), Jennifer Willet enages with GMO bacteria growing in LB Agar petri dishes. Each plate presents imaginary biological vignettes where non-human organisms teach humans complex biotechnological processes. In this work, living bacteria cultures serve as collaborators in the creative process creating artworks that are both sublime and disgusting. Baroque Biology (Paper Theatre) presents a series of biotechnological vignettes where I reimagine laboratory aesthetics as feminine, gawdy, and fantastical in direct contradiction to the norms of contemporary scientific practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

STEM education is on demand more than ever as the workforce relies on 21st century skills and STEM disciplines. This paper presents a framework (IMS-TEAM) for integration of mathematics and science with the use of technology and modeling in an authentic context. The activity based on this framework is designed for and implemented with forty-four 8th grade students in Turkey. The study was conducted to investigate the impact of the activity as well as the IMS-TEAM framework. A qualitative methodology was utilized. Data analysis revealed that different components of our conceptual framework fostered the integration of mathematics and science affecting the nature of students' engagement with the activity. Different frameworks are required to be adapted to different environments with the consideration of learners and teachers. Future research investigating the effectiveness of IMS-TEAM framework adapted to different content and disciplines would provide more evidence on the effectiveness of the framework.