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The pedagogical training of science graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) could be a key element of change in the teaching practices of university STEM courses over time. Our course, Teaching Science at University (TSAU), focuses on university science pedagogies and centers assignment work around consideration of student prior knowledge and interests. Here we use qualitative content analysis to evaluate 75 course participants’ assignments on analogy design, specifically their choice of science concept and analog and their reflections on the analogy’s learning impact. We found the majority constructed analogies mapping suitably abstract, complex science concepts to familiar, every day, experience-based analogs. Some analogs, though familiar, were nevertheless problematic as they required a technical understanding (e.g. how a copy machine works) before mapping to the science concept (e.g. polymerase chain reaction) could be fruitful. Mapping of the mismatches, where the analogy no longer works, was a new teaching concept for participants and one they saw as valuable. To assess their students’ learning with analogies, two thirds of participants focused on lower-level cognitive tasks like recalling or summarizing scientific content and the rest focused on higher-level thinking such as using the analogy in a new setting or creating an improved version of the analogy. Analogies’ facilitation of greater student critical thinking by the latter group is interesting in the light of research showing most assessment in university science courses focuses on lower cognitive levels such as recall of information. Overall, we found that specific instruction in planned and thorough use of analogies is fruitful, and a structured guide to analogy construction works well for a university audience.

Games as a didactic tool (e. g., puzzles) are gaining recognition in environmental education to promote skill development, but also to develop a specific understanding of the natural world. However, a children’s puzzle containing representations of nature may unwillingly lead to “misconceptions” of biodiversity themes and processes, and an over-simplification of the relationship between people and nature. To solve this problem, positive connotations of biodiversity may prompt a conceptual change to a more nuanced, multifaceted conception of biodiversity.

Dropout rates for university students in STEM fields are high, and students often cite poor teaching as a contributing factor. Improving the teaching skills of university science instructors needs a different approach from school-teacher training, as university instructors often have different career goals and different views of the role of students in learning. In this paper, we present “Teaching Science at University,” a professional development course focused on developing pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) and grounded in the Model of Educational Reconstruction (MER) as a framework for the design of teaching interventions. Course participants are early-career scientists (from PhD researchers to tenure-track professors) with expertise in their scientific field but little educational training. They start the course with sophisticated content knowledge (CK), and through the course, they gain content- and audience-specific pedagogical techniques (PCK). To assess the effects of the course, we analyzed participants’ assignments (n = 63) and pre- and post-course surveys (n = 100, 54). We found that participants demonstrated an increased value of student-centered teaching, especially the consideration of students’ prior knowledge. We found participants were not only able to build conceptual change interventions specific to their learners’ levels of knowledge, but that they also expressed appreciation for the structure that the MER provided to the design of teaching and its role in emphasizing student conceptions. We conclude that PCK-based teaching training should have a role in improving instruction in higher education. We also conclude that the MER provides a useful framework for the design of teaching interventions by science instructors at the university level, and we propose a five-step MER approach for daily teaching practice.

In this perspective article we start from the theories of constructivism and conceptual change within the field of education to develop and present hypotheses about how understandings of biodiversity and diversity more generally are formed. We argue that extrinsic and circumstantial elements from everyday experiences are relevant in shaping understandings of biodiversity. We discuss how children’s games and food-related experiences may influence how children form conceptions of biodiversity. We focus on ‘misconceptions,’ areas where conceptions differ from established ideas in ecology. These include: underestimating the importance of diversity for “complementarity” and over-simplifications of how nature works. Firstly, we examine a type of children’s game that often concerns biodiversity and consists of a puzzle where the forming of categories is encouraged. Secondly, we discuss people’s relation to nature through food in their diets. We believe that targeted intervention is needed to move towards an inclusive and multi-faceted representation of biodiversity, one that emphasises fundamental properties that make a whole and interacting parts. We argue that experiences of games and food can be pivotal in developing a deeper understanding of these fundamental properties of biodiversity. These would be important experiences to consider when attempting transformative change of relationships between people and nature.