Description : The course aims at providing students (a) with knowledge about the emergence and development of young children’s ideas about the biological world, as well as (b) with the opportunity to practice the design of teaching-learning activities about entities and phenomena of this world.
Outline : The course is concerned with the following topics: Introduction to “Biology Didactics” or “Biology Education Research” and its potential use for improving biology education; Young children’s “naïve biology”; Views on learning; The IBSE-model in early biology education; Young children's ideas about a series of biological concepts and the design of teaching-learning activities about them. The course includes lectures with presentation and discussion of the topics, individual- or group-work on designing teaching-learning activities with the aid of worksheets, as well as critical whole-class discussions about student's designs. International students can be tutored in English and assessed with essays on the topics of the course.