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How Should We Select Conceptual Content for Biology High School Curricula?

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Abstract

The excess of curriculum content is a well-known problem in high school biology. Some strategies to adjust the amount of content to the available classroom time have been proposed, but none has been widely accepted and applied. Furthermore, biology is frequently presented in high school not as an integrated science, but as a collection of unrelated sub-areas, say, zoology, botany, physiology, genetics, and evolution. In this paper, we advance a proposal on how to develop non-arbitrary, clear criteria for selecting conceptual content to be taught and learnt in order to make the biology high school curriculum more integrated and less loaded with content. We argue that we should adopt the idea of structuring concepts for seizing the prominent role some ideas play in biological thinking. We discuss how a hierarchical conceptual framework of biology can help us to identify key concepts as well as connections between these concepts that can allow students understand sub-areas of biology. We also advocate for establishing a balance between the concepts from functional and evolutionary biology, on the one hand, and concepts representing (i) systemic components, (ii) processes, and (iii) descriptive elements, on the other hand. Finally we exemplify how these criteria can be applied by providing a proposal for structuring concepts of biology as a whole and the theory of evolution in particular.

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Notes

  1. Considering two 50-min classes a week along three high school years containing 200 days each, the minimum required by the Brazilian legislation (Lei de Diretrizes e Bases da Educação National Education Guidelines and Framework Law, Law n° 9.394 1996).

  2. It is in dispute if the uprising of the Modern Synthetic Theory of Evolution did actually unify biology as a science when considering the conceptual frameworks that guided academic research (Smocovitis 1996). On the one hand, some biological areas did not contribute as much as genetics or did not contribute at all to that new framework. On the other, many areas did not adopt the new framework promptly. However, as discussed by Ferreira and Selles (2005), the creation of the high school discipline of biology adopted the synthesis narrative, ignoring the conflicts and discussions among biologists that were already occurring at the time.

  3. This does not mean that teachers’ practical knowledge is to be dismissed. On the contrary, teacher knowledge provides invaluable context-sensitive information and, through reflection on practice, can achieve higher degree of generality (e.g., McIntyre 2005). But if we want clear guidelines for content selection that can be widely applied to all educational contexts, individual knowledge will not be enough, despite its relevance.

  4. Freely translated by the authors from the Spanish original: “[...] bastaría definir cuáles son los conceptos estructurantes de una ciencia, para poder definir los ‘objetivos a alcanzar’ en los diferentes cursos.”

  5. In the Spanish original: “De acuerdo a la perspectiva constructivista, esos conceptos estructurantes serán también construidos por el alumno al mismo tiempo que construye otros conocimientos.”

  6. In the Spanish original: “Los puntos del programa deben ser elegidos en función de esa construcción.”

  7. For our purposes here, we can use Pickett, Kolasa, and Jones’ (2007, p. 38) definition of a domain as “[...] the set of objects, relationships, and dynamics at specified spatial and temporal scales that are the subject of scientific inquiry.”

  8. The expression “constitutive theory” is a neutral expression to indicate that a certain theory is included into a more inclusive one. The three levels described by Scheiner are only a didactic simplification of a structure formed by a continuum of many levels. A constitutive theory can, thus, encompass several levels of increasingly specific constitutive theories.

  9. Except if those constitutive theories and models have importance in the students’ social context for reasons other than science learning, as we discuss in section 1.

  10. Niche construction has been disputed by some authors (e.g., Caponi 2016b) but has also been increasingly used, especially for connecting organismic, ecological and evolutionary accounts (e.g., Kylafis and Loreau 2008, 2011; Laland et al. 2008). For this latter reason, we make use of this concept as an example here.

  11. See Nicholson and Dupré (2018) for an account on a processual philosophy of biology that is relevant to the topic discussed here.

  12. We adopt a hierarchical approach in which each level of a system is nested into the level immediately above it (see Ahl and Allen 1996; Allen and Hoekstra 2015). There has been controversy lately on whether the notion of levels is indeed useful or whether it is a misleading idea. The latter position is called by Brooks (2017), who defend the concept of levels, “levels skepticism” (which can be found, e.g., in Ladyman and Ross 2007, Rueger and McGivern 2010, Potochnik and McGill 2012, Eronen 2015). The fact that the concept of levels has received relatively little theoretical and/or philosophical attention certainly does not help. Despite voiced concerns, we consider useful for our arguments to rely on the reference to levels, using this notion in the sense in which a property that characterizes a complex system is at a higher level than the properties characterizing components of a complex system or in the sense in which a system is itself a higher-level entity in relation to the entities that compose it.

  13. The chemical structures of nucleotides can be shown to students, but only to make it explicit the principle that the structure of a molecule affects its chemical affinity to other molecules.

  14. We can consider the concepts in this list as indispensable if we want students to understand the explanations biology offers. All the five general theories will provide the grounds to understand them through the connections of their own concepts with the ones included in this list.

  15. We should make it clear that we tackle this set of ideas from the perspective of an extended evolutionary synthesis (e.g., Pigliucci and Müller 2010), as one can see from the inclusion of concepts like contingency and bricolage in this list of structuring concepts. We should remind the readers, however, that we do not intend to propose here any exhaustive or definitive list, but rather a proposal to be discussed.

  16. Nonetheless, ideas like lineages of genes can find their places in the general theory of genetics, for example.

  17. A short definition of causal determinism suffices for our purposes in this paper: “Causal determinism is, roughly speaking, the idea that every event is necessitated by antecedent events and conditions together with the laws of nature.” (Hoefer 2016)

  18. The definition of randomness (and its relation to chance) is the subject of an ongoing debate in philosophy (see Eagle 2019) and will not be discussed in depth here. For our purposes, we can adopt the view expressed by Futuyma (2005, p. 225) as a working definition: “[...] scientists use chance, or randomness, to mean that when physical causes can result in any of several outcomes, we cannot predict what the outcome will be in any particular case.”

  19. They can be regarded as categorizations because we sort organisms into different lineages, while contingency is sorted apart from determinism and complete randomness, and geological time is sorted apart from human lifetime.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Daniela Lopes Scarpa, Gustavo Andrés Caponi and Marco Antônio Barzano for all the commentaries and contributions made during the defense of the dissertation from which this work is derived.

Funding

The Brazilian National Council of Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq, Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico, grant n. 465767/2014-1) and the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES, Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior, grant n. 23038.000776/2017-54) provided support to INCT IN-TREE. CNEH received from CNPq a productivity in research grant (grant n. 303011/2017-3). INC received from CAPES a master’s degree grant. This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior—Brasil (CAPES)—Finance Code 001.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Biology, Federal University of Bahia, Salvador, Brazil

    Ítalo Nascimento de Carvalho & Charbel N. El-Hani

  2. National Institute of Science and Technology in Interdisciplinary and Transdisciplinary Studies in Ecology and Evolution (INCT IN-TREE), Salvador, Brazil

    Ítalo Nascimento de Carvalho, Charbel N. El-Hani & Nei Nunes-Neto

  3. Faculty of Biological and Environmental Sciences, Federal University of Grande Dourados, Dourados, Brazil

    Nei Nunes-Neto

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Appendix

Appendix

Table 2 The domain and fundamental principles of the theory of biology. Source: Scheiner (2010, p. 299)
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Table 3 The domain and fundamental principles of the theory of genetics Source: Scheiner (2010, p. 303)
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Table 4 The domain and fundamental principles of the theory of cells. Source: Scheiner (2010, p. 302)
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Table 5 The domain and fundamental principles of a general theory of organisms and the subtheory of multicellular organisms. Source: Zamer and Scheiner (2014, p. 741)
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Table 6 The domain and fundamental principles of the theory of ecology. Source: Scheiner and Willig (2011, p. 13)
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Table 7 The domain and fundamental principles of the theory of evolution. Source: Scheiner and Mindell (2020)
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de Carvalho, Í.N., El-Hani, C.N. & Nunes-Neto, N. How Should We Select Conceptual Content for Biology High School Curricula?. Sci & Educ 29, 513–547 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-020-00115-9

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