Biology

This resource collection includes lessons for nine biology themes and content areas: matter and energy transformation, organization and development of living organisms, earth systems and patterns, energy, interdependence, heredity and reproduction, diversity and evolution of living organisms, the practice of science, and integration of knowledge and ideas. It also offers lessons for six different instructional elements: multiple modalities, funds of knowledge, collaboration, affirming identities, sociopolitical consciousness, and attention to language.

This collection of 10 investigations offers collaborative, NGSS-aligned plant science lessons for middle and high school that include guides for students, teachers, and mentors.

Educating students about real-world, issues such as local invasive species aims to encourage wider engagement with STEM.

Justice-centred science pedagogy has been suggested as an effective framework for supporting teachers in bringing in culturally relevant pedagogy to their science classrooms; however, limited instructional tools exist that introduce social dimensions of science in ways teachers feel confident navigating. In this article, we add to the justice-centred science pedagogy framework by offering tools to make sense of science and social factors and introduce socioscientific modelling as an instructional strategy for attending to social dimensions of science in ways that align with justice-centred science pedagogy.

Research on socio-scientific issues (SSI) has revealed that it is critical for learners to develop a systematic understanding of the underlying issue. In this paper, we explore how modeling can facilitate students’ systems thinking in the context of SSI. Building on evidence from prior research in promoting systems thinking skills through modeling in scientific contexts, we hypothesize that a similar modeling approach could effectively foster students’ systematic understanding of complex societal issues.

We investigated how the level of variance in students’ prior knowledge may have influenced their collaborative interactions and science learning in small groups. We examined learning outcomes from 102 groups from seven science teachers’ classes and discourse from two contrasting groups: Homogeneous versus heterogeneous. We examined individual and group outcomes using hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) to explore the effect of membership in a homogeneous or heterogeneous group on students’ learning. We then used social network analyses (SNA) to identify any differences in interaction patterns between the two contrasting groups as they conducted multiple compost simulations. Finally, we examined students’ discussions in these groups to better understand their interactions.