Molecular life science is one of the fastest-growing fields of scientific and technical innovation, and biotechnology has profound effects on many aspects of daily life—often with deep, ethical dimensions. At the same time, the content is inherently complex, highly abstract, and deeply rooted in diverse disciplines ranging from “pure sciences,” such as math, chemistry, and physics, through “applied sciences,” such as medicine and agriculture, to subjects that are traditionally within the remit of humanities, notably philosophy and ethics. Together, these features pose diverse, important, and exciting challenges for tomorrow's teachers and educational establishments. With backgrounds in molecular life science research and secondary life science teaching, we (Tibell and Rundgren, respectively) bring different experiences, perspectives, concerns, and awareness of these issues. Taking the nature of the discipline as a starting point, we highlight important facets of molecular life science that are both characteristic of the domain and challenging for learning and education. Of these challenges, we focus most detail on content, reasoning difficulties, and communication issues. We also discuss implications for education research and teaching in the molecular life sciences.

ABSTRACT. Images, diagrams, and other forms of visualization are playing increasingly important roles in molecular life science teaching and research, both for conveying information and as conceptual tools, transforming the way we think about the events and processes the subject covers. This study examines how upper secondary and tertiary students interpret visualizations of transport through the cell membrane in the form of a still image and an animation. Twenty upper secondary and five tertiary students were interviewed. In addition, 31 university students participated in a group discussion and answered a questionnaire regarding the animation. A model, based on variation theory, was then tested as a tool for distinguishing between what is expected to be learned, what is present in the visualizations, and what is actually learned by the students. Three critical features of the ability to visualize biomolecular processes were identified from the students' interpretations of the animation: the complexity of biomolecular processes, the dynamic and random nature of biomolecular interactions, and extrapolation between 2D and 3D. The results of this study support the use of multiple representations to achieve different learning goals.

This study aims to explore students' argumentation and decision-making relating to an authentic socioscientific issue (SSI)-the problem of environmental toxins in fish from the Baltic Sea. A multi-disciplinary instructional module, designed in order to develop students' skills to argue about complex SSI, was successfully tested. Seven science majors in the final year of their upper secondary studies participated in this study. Their argumentation and decision-making processes were followed closely, and data were collected during multiple stages of the instructional module: group discussions were audio recorded, the participants wrote reports on their decision making, and postexercise interviews were conducted with individual students. The analysis focused on the skill of evaluation demonstrated by the students during the exercise and the relationships between the knowledge, values, and experiences that they used in their argumentation. Even though all of the students had access to the same information and agreed on the factual aspects of the issue, they came to different decisions. All of the students took counter-arguments and the limitations of their claims into account and were able to extend their claims where appropriate. However, their decisions differed depending on their background knowledge, values, and experiences (i.e., their intellectual baggage). The implication to SSI teaching and learning is discussed.

Previous research suggests that students use metaphors when asked to explain digestive processes and nutritional uptake. In this paper, we describe the results of a study designed to gain a deeper understanding of how metaphors and anthropomorphisms are used by students when describing such processes. We applied analyses based on the systemic-functional grammar framework to 123 student responses to a question about nutrition on a Swedish national test in biology in order to identify, describe and analyse how students use metaphors and to understand the linguistic structure of those metaphors. We also considered how the metaphors are linked to metaphor systems and anthropomorphisms, thereby gaining a deeper understanding of the role of metaphors in this area. The results of our analyses provide important insights into how students understand digestion and nutrition and could provide the basis for improved teaching materials and methods for these important topics.

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Understandings of the nature of scientific inquiry (NOSI), as opposed to engaging students in inquiry learning experiences,

The current Swedish curricula for compulsory school (Lgr11) emphasize inquiry-based science teaching to develop pupils’ critical thinking while the Swedish laboratory teaching tradition emphasize laboratory work to promote students’ conceptual understanding. The aim of this study is to illuminate how a group of teachers within the Swedish teaching tradition, based on the prevailing condition, met the external expectations of involving pupils in inquiry-based science teaching. During a teacher professional development program, the entire group of lower secondary science teachers within a school district, twelve in total, participated in group reflections about own inquiry activities. The results indicated that teachers, despite shortage of activities, wanted to involve pupils in inquiry-based science teaching to meet the curricula’s and national tests’ request for such activities. The teachers did this through hybridization, in which the teachers opened up and transformed existing laboratory activities; and by imitation, in which they imitated how investigative inquiry is carried out on national tests. Inquiry-based science teaching, as it emerges in this study, possessed several characteristics might limiting the potential for pupils to develop an understanding functional for critical thinking in private- and public lives.