Teaching Methods in Biology Education and Sustainability Education Including Outdoor Education for Promoting Sustainability—A Literature Review

Abstract

There are very few studies concerning the importance of teaching methods in biology education and environmental education including outdoor education for promoting sustainability at the levels of primary and secondary schools and pre-service teacher education. The material was selected using special keywords from biology and sustainable education in several scientific databases. The article provides an overview of 24 selected articles published in peer-reviewed scientific journals from 2006-2016. The data was analyzed using qualitative content analysis. Altogether, 16 journals were selected and 24 articles were analyzed in detail. The foci of the analyses were teaching methods, learning environments, knowledge and thinking skills, psychomotor skills, emotions and attitudes, and evaluation methods. Additionally, features of good methods were investigated and their implications for teaching were emphasized. In total, 22 different teaching methods were found to improve sustainability education in different ways. The most emphasized teaching methods were those in which students worked in groups and participated actively in learning processes. Research points toward the value of teaching methods that provide a good introduction and supportive guidelines and include active participation and interactivity.

Teaching and Learning Methods in Geography Promoting Sustainability

“…Teaching SD in geography depends not only on high-quality subject matter knowledge, but also on modern pedagogical content knowledge, meaning the teachers' interpretations and transformations of subject matter knowledge support students' learning [14]. Teaching and learning methods should include goal-oriented activities and information exchange between a teacher and students [23]. It is important to study teaching and learning methods, as they have effects on cognitive, affective, and psychomotor learning [83,84].…”

“…Using different teaching methods together and incorporating ICT can improve learning. As in the study of biology teaching methods [23], ICT, group work, and teacher presentations were popular. Haubrich [29] recommended group work and discussions as appropriate teaching and learning methods for studying ecological issues.…”

“…SDE, for its part, looks at the interaction between ecological and social systems with a view to developing solutions to a variety of unexpected situations [22]. All three are focused on quality education and a society that takes into account the carrying capacity of the globe [23]. Thus, they can be considered to include all dimensions of SD.…”

“…In this qualitative study, the focus was on articles that concerned geography teaching and SD. The data collection method was a modification of the method used by Jeronen et al [23]. Articles for the analysis were sourced from scientific databases, such as ERIC, Web of Science, and Education Database.…”

Learning interest of pre-service biology teachers on contextual-based Plant Morphology course

“…There are several reasons why learning the concept of science (biology) and its branches are considered to be more difficult and do not appeal to students (Macaulay, Van Damme, & Walker, 2009;Zhang, Liu, Yang, Tripp, & Shao, 2017). These reasons are interdisciplinary nature of biological concepts, the biological organization level and the abstract level of the concepts, the overload of biology curricula, the abstractness and difficulties with the textbooks (Çimer, 2012;Schnittka & Bell, 2009), and containing very much definition or specification of the phenomena (Jeronen, Palmberg, & Tli-Panula, 2016;Yli-Panula, Jeronen, Seiko-Ahlströn, & Ruotsalainen, 2017).…”