We investigate teaching-learning processes in biology lessons with a focus on understanding and narration, socioscientific issues and digital learning.
Doctoral Projects
Enhancing Socioscientific Issues in the Biology Teacher Training Program
As part of his doctoral project, René Leubecher is investigating how biology teaching students can be prepared for the challenges of bioethical teaching during their studies. The aim of the doctoral project is to find out how prospective biology teachers can be supported early on in their training to overcome these challenges in their profession.
In a first step, the challenges described by biology teachers will be examined in more detail. In a review of these studies, the focus is shifted from subject-specific Pedagogical Content Knowledge to the beliefs and emotions of biology teachers in relation to Socioscientific Issues. The Theory of Planned behavior forms the background for this. In a further step, the Pedagogical Content Knowledge, beliefs and emotions of biology student teachers in relation to Socioscientific Issues are examined and compared with those of biology teachers.
The aim of the project is to use the comparison to identify potentials and obstacles that can be used to plan, implement and evaluate further training measures on Socioscientific Issues in the training of biology student teachers.
Stronger together for biodiversity through citizen science-based nature conservation projects?
Citizen science involves the active participation of people - with and without formal academic qualifications. The main goal of the biodiversity-based Citizen Science project VielFalterGarten is to jointly research and observe butterflies in Leipzig in order to learn more about them and their conservation (www.vielfaltergarten.de). The VielFalterGarten methodology is simple and accessible: in butterfly monitoring, participants define an observation point and use the VielFalterGarten app to count and identify butterflies once a week for 15 minutes. The collected results are collected on a dynamic map. Based on this data, conservation measures can then be derived and implemented by the participants in order to protect and improve the butterflies' habitats.
The intervention program, which is aimed at secondary school students, includes both a community insect conservation project, the butterfly-friendly design of the school garden, and the socially networked project VielFalterGarten, the butterfly monitoring. The aim of the intervention is to investigate the extent to which the use of conservation projects with a Citizen Science component in school environmental education promotes the perceived action competence for insect conservation and the variables of social identity among secondary school students.
Effects and Effectiveness of Writing Narratives in Biology Classroom
Julia Zdunek's doctoral project examines how narrative methods can promote understanding of biological concepts.
Public discourse on biological topics is influenced by various factors, including technically inappropriate representations and conspiracy narratives. This became especially evident during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. On one hand, such narratives exploited by the media make it challenging to adequately teach biological phenomena. On the other hand, this scenario also demonstrates how effective narratives can be for communicating scientific topics, even if based on invalid facts. Since narratively structured information is easy to understand, remember, and reproduce, narrative appears to be a suitable educational tool for teaching and learning complex biological concepts.
Moreover narratives allow learners to incorporate emotions and subjective experiences, enriching the objective ("cold") biological contexts,e.g. sexual plant reproduction, with individual meaning and personal relevance. Appropriate tasks that also involve reflection on learners' narrative products offer the possibility of an elaborate and sustainable understanding as a synthesis of subjective and objective elements. However, the potential of narrative approaches for learning processes in biology classes has not been sufficiently studied, yet. In her project, Julia Zdunek investigates the effectiveness of productive, narrative methods and their impact on learners' understanding. The approach focuses on ecological and botanical learning contexts, which often lack interest and relevance for learners.
BiodigitaliS: Digitalisation of pre-service Biology Teacher Training at Leipzig University
The digitalisation of education and schools confronts teachers with new challenges in the classroom. Pre-service teacher training programmes should enable prospective teachers to overcome these challenges by fostering their subject-specific digital skills and their intention to teach subject-specific lessons including digital media. The "BiodigitaliS" project investigates how digital media can be systematically integrated into existing pre-service biology teacher training courses. Research within this Project is focused on the:
- Conditions in the context of pre-service biology teacher training and their targeted change,
- Pre-service teachers’ beliefs regarding the use of digital media in biology lessons,
- the effect of the specifically modified courses on pre-service teachers’ intentions to use digital media in biology lessons.
"BiodigitaliS" was part of the joint project of Leipzig University and TU Dresden entitled "PraxisdigitaliS: Praxis digital gestalten in Sachsen", which was funded by the BMBF with a volume of almost three million euros for the period 2020-2023. Prof. Dr Sonja Ganguin (Leipzig University) was the scientific project manager of the project, which was coordinated by the Centre for Teacher Education and School Research (ZLS).
Conceptual Change Stories: Context-specific Promotion of Systems Understanding through
Cornelia Averdunk’s dissertation project investigates the impact of context-specific conceptual change stories on cross-cutting understanding in the field of biological systems.
Biology education should enables learners to participate in society by promoting an understanding of ecosystems. A central concept in the context of ecosystems is interaction. In terms of cumulative learning, it seems reasonable to introduce interaction as a cross-cuttingconcept in early secondary class. The topic of food relationships between populations in an ecosystem is suitable for this purpose.
Studies show that students often have preconceptions which make it difficult to understand food relationships as non-linear, dynamic interactions. For this reason, instructional strategies are needed that explicitly address learners' preconceptions and foster a development of more scientific conceptions..
Based on conceptual change texts, which have already been approved, Cornelia Averdunk develops and investigates so-called conceptual change stories. This narrative-designed learning material picks up well-known preconceptions aboutinteractions infood webs and has the potential to promote conceptual development. In order to empirically substantiate this assumption, the first step is to investigat the extent to which conceptual change stories promote the understanding in the context of food relationships. As the project progresses, the aspect of the cross-cutting concept of interaction will become more important: the ability to describe food relationships as interactions can also be interpreted as a form of systems thinking. In a second step, the effectiveness of conceptual change stories on the students' systems thinking will therefore be investigated in more detail.
Planning Biology Lessons on Socioscientific Issues
As part of her doctoral project, Laura Hartleb is investigating the lesson planning of teachers in the area of Socioscientific Issues. Teachers still find it difficult to foster decision-making skills in their students.
Whether and how Socioscientific Isses are chosen for instruction is decided during lesson planning. For this reason, the project is investigating, how teachers proceed when selecting Socioscientific Isses and corresponding teaching methods and materials. Initial results indicate that teachers' beliefs about biology teaching are relevant in this context. Among other things, the Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) of the teachers is described for analysis.
Research Projects and Cooperations
IsoCube: Using a Live-Ecosystem-Model to foster technological and pedagogical competencies among biology pre-service teachers
The project aims to develop, test and integrate a teaching concept into the biology education curriculum at Leipzig University. Using the live-ecosystem-model IsoCube, an isopod terrarium equipped with a sensor system and a camera module, prospective biology teachers i) expand their ecological expertise, ii) develop teaching skills in sensor-based data collection and data analysis, and iii) apply their newly acquired skills in the development of learning scenarios for secondary level students. A two-stage theory-oriented evaluation ensures the quality of the seminar concept and facilitates long-term curricular integration and transfer to other university locations. The project is funded by the Joachim Herz Foundation.
ECOSCOMICS
The Erasmus+ project [project number: 2021-1-FR01-KA220-SCH-000030110] brings together scientists from the natural sciences and science education, as well as artists from five different European countries. This collaboration spans a period of three years with the aim of raising awareness of the causes and consequences of climate change and promoting understanding of the underlying concepts.
To achieve this goal, web-based Science Comics are being developed and tested as a teaching and learning medium. The theatre group "Supertroupers" guides readers through seven episodes on various topics from the fields of physics, geology/geography, and biology. To promote understanding in the sense of conceptual change (Vosniadou et al., 2008), the science comics address popular alternative ideas and encourage readers to reflect on these alongside the protagonists.
An annual cooperation meeting serves both purposes: designing the Science Comic according to didactic criteria (Conceptual Change) and exchanging research and evaluation results from the use of the new medium in classroom pilot tests. The Leipzig team (Prof. Dr. Jörg Zabel and Julia Zdunek) is particularly involved in designing and testing the Science Comics on biological topics such as evolution, biodiversity, and oceans. The official launch of the web comic platform is planned for autumn 2024.
