Observations are fundamental in science as they has to include cognitive activities based on the perceived sensations. These activities have to be transformed to written or spoken language. In order to practice and visualize these processes we present a method based on Roland Barthes concepts studium and punctum. About 60 students aiming at becoming primary school teachers (years 4–6) were followed during a period of the first two years of their education. The results on all course examinations during these years (n=17) were compared to the quality of two reflective texts. One from the end of the first year on the impression of art works by David Hockney or Bill Viola, another of experiences from field sites used at the beginning of their studies. They wrote reflections on their experiences including observations and their personal and professional development during their teacher training. The texts where analysed by using the 4 R’s of Doll’s. Results of VARK tests assessing the learning style of the students from the beginning of their education were used. The choice of science courses can be shown to be correlated to different factors depending of the selection of these but there was no general pattern behind the choice of science. Training of observation in different contexts and reflections on these in relation to personal development seem to promote better professional understanding.

Most people are uncertain about how nutrients enter and are distributed in the body. They may be capable of naming the different parts of the digestive system on a torso but have vague ideas of the relation between these organs and the chemical processes they govern. Reasons for this are poor understanding of gas exchange, the role of the circulatory system, and that most processes are intracellular. In order to create a more holistic view of the biology and chemistry of digestion these subjects may be taught simultaneously and integrated. Here practical exercises and lectures about digestion and nutrients for pre-service primary school teachers are presented. The practical work included food preparation in order to investigate the change of the properties of the macromolecules of nutrients. A simple drawing of a body was used in order to visualize the routes of nutrients and the role of gas exchange in digestion. An evolutionary perspective on digestion was used in order to explain the ancient origin of most chemical processes in the digestive system and in the whole body. The material produced by the students at their final examinations was used for assessing their use and understanding of concepts, the quality based on Doll’s 4R’s and the degree of holistic understanding of the digestive system. The findings show that the pedagogic design used gives a general picture of digestion and energy transfer usable for teaching in primary school.

Connectivity plays an important role in shaping the genetic structure and in evolution of local adaptation. In the marine environment barriers to gene flow are in most cases caused by gradients in environmental factors, ocean circulation and/or larval behavior. Despite the long pelagic larval stages, with high potential for dispersal many marine organisms have been shown to have a fine scale genetic structuring. In this study, by using a combination of high-resolution genetic markers, species hybridization data and biophysical modeling we can present a comprehensive picture of the evolutionary landscape for a keystone species in the Baltic Sea, the blue mussel. We identified distinct genetic differentiation between the West Coast, Baltic Proper and Bothnian Sea regions, with lower gene diversity in the Bothnian Sea. Oceanographic connectivity together with salinity and to some extent species identity provides explanations for the genetic differentiation between the West Coast and the Baltic Sea (Baltic Proper and Bothnian Sea). The genetic differentiation between the Baltic Proper and Bothnian Sea cannot be directly explained by oceanographic connectivity, species identity or salinity, while the lower connectivity to the Bothnian Sea may explain the lower gene diversity. © 2016.

Teaching pre-service preschool teachers in technology is a challenge. Technology is a fairly new subject in school, students lack experiences and are not aware of the aim of the subject. In addition technology also include the consequences of technological choices for individuals, society and environment. The curriculum for pre-school in Sweden emphasize development of children´s knowledge in science, technology and their ability to identify technology in everyday life. The education of pre-service teachers involves visualization of their own tacit knowledge and experiences to be used in the teaching of technology. Here a course during a three weeks period with 55 pre-service teacher students is presented. They worked in groups with construction exercises, museum visit and outdoor technology walk. The students wrote summaries of the processes together with critical reflections. The written exams on the identification of technology in everyday life were analysed by using the quality markers 4R’s of Doll’s and compared with marks on their examination tasks. Our results show that many students could describe the processes of construction with high quality showing several perspectives of understanding, e.g., the advantage of group activity, their own development of understanding and how to teach children in preschool.

Teaching evolution is a tricky business. Less teaching seems to give better understanding of the theory. Evolutionary processes are dialectic relations between many actors, individuals, groups, abiotic and biotic factors etc., different from mechanistic descriptions of relations between singular objects in other scientific theories. This difference, in combination with religious beliefs confuses efforts to get understanding and acceptance of the theory of evolution. With the new curriculum for Swedish compulsory school, science education has to be linked to students’ own experiences in order to promote critical thinking and skills useable in daily life. Further, biology in science teaching during the first school years is focused on general observations and fundamental concepts, not on scientific methods and evolutionary processes. Thus, students often experience biology as a subject filled with facts about simple relations and teleological explanations, making the theory of evolution superfluous. The objectives here were to design teaching in evolutionary theory adapted to the professional needs of students and to assess the learning outcome. Three different courses in evolutionary theory were included. Two pre-service teacher training programs, for nursery school and for year 4–6 in the compulsory school, and one for students in environmental studies were included. Assessments of learning outcome were made by analyses of texts written by the students. The quality of the science knowledge content and the personal and professional development were assessed by using the 4 R’s of Doll. Associations between concepts and understanding were evaluated using clustering and ordination statistical techniques. The learning outcome was good showing visible progressions in the understanding. Thus, it is important to assess the understanding of concepts rather than estimating their frequency in students texts.

According to the Swedish curriculum for primary school it is important in science subjects to develop skills to observe, to describe the observations and to put them into a theoretical framework already starting year 1–3.

Thus, it may be important for the teacher not only to be accustomed to the methods of observing but also to be an expert on using these observations in order to design teaching situations where these skills may be developed.

Here we present a study where 25 pre-service primary school teacher students at the beginning of a 20 weeks course established a relation to a study site focused on ecological questions. The task during the first week of that course was to observe and describe two habitats in the field and suggest what abiotic and biotic factors that had shaped the variation focussing at competition as an important ecological factor. In order to connect those ecological aspects with evolutionary aspects, specimen of the common species in the two habitats were collected and brought to the lab where the students constructed phenetic trees based on morphology but also on ecologically relevant properties like roots/no roots, expecting the set-up to awake evolutionary reflection. A main goal with this week was to give the students tools to investigate nature – to observe and describe patterns and to explain them by observing abiotic and biotic variation and evolutionary features and limitations.

Later during the course we created other, often not obviously similar, situations where the students had the opportunity to use the experiences of this first training week. We used open questions for reflections and examinations in order to get written material to assess the development of the skills.

We found notable personal development in most students and a greater awareness about the importance of personal cognitive activities in order to create better understanding and ability to use achieved knowledge in different situations.

Human-derived environmental pollutants and nutrients that reach the aquatic environment through sewage effluents, agricultural and industrial processes are constantly contributing to environmental changes that serve as drivers for adaptive responses and evolutionary changes in many taxa. In this study, we examined how two types of point sources of aquatic environmental pollution, harbors and sewage treatment plants, affect gene diversity and genetic differentiation in the blue mussel in the Baltic Sea area and off the Swedish west coast (Skagerrak). Reference sites (REF) were geographically paired with sites from sewage treatments plant (STP) and harbors (HAR) with a nested sampling scheme, and genetic differentiation was evaluated using a high-resolution marker amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP). This study showed that genetic composition in the Baltic Sea blue mussel was associated with exposure to sewage treatment plant effluents. In addition, mussel populations from harbors were genetically divergent, in contrast to the sewage treatment plant populations, suggesting that there is an effect of pollution from harbors but that the direction is divergent and site specific, while the pollution effect from sewage treatment plants on the genetic composition of blue mussel populations acts in the same direction in the investigated sites.

Horizontal gene transfer involves the non-sexual interspecific transmission of genetic material. Even if they are initially functional, horizontally transferred genes are expected to deteriorate into non-expressed pseudogenes, unless they become adaptively relevant in the recipient organism. However, little is known about the distributions of natural transgenes within wild species or the adaptive significance of natural transgenes within wild populations. Here, we examine the distribution of a natural plant-to-plant nuclear transgene in relation to environmental variation within a wild population. Festuca ovina is polymorphic for an extra (second) expressed copy of the nuclear gene (PgiC) encoding cytosolic phosphoglucose isomerase, with the extra PgiC locus having been acquired horizontally from the distantly related grass genus Poa. We investigated variation at PgiC in samples of F. ovina from a fine-scale, repeating patchwork of grassland microhabitats, replicated within spatially separated sites. Even after accounting for spatial effects, the distributions of F. ovina individuals carrying the additional PgiC locus, and one of the enzyme products encoded by the locus, are significantly associated with fine-scale habitat variation. Our results suggest that the PgiC transgene contributes, together with the unlinked 'native' PgiC locus, to local adaptation to a fine-scale mosaic of edaphic and biotic grassland microhabitats.

To assess the quality of different aspects of the learning outcomes in relation to knowledge requirements as results of teaching several assessment methods have to be used. For most teachers it is also obvious that students differ in their ability to demonstrate the learning outcome depending on the assessment method used. In order to compare different assessment methods of the learning outcome of pre-school teacher students’ different types of tasks were evaluated and compared in order to identify the potential of each method to give the students fair chances of showing their skills. Thus, assessments based on multiple choice questionnaires of different types, long answer questions, practical laboratory experiments, experiment construction and the students ability to evaluate experiment plans were compared. Having Swedish as mother tongue also was included as an explanatory variable since we suspected that some of the assessment methods in reality rather evaluates the linguistic skills in interpreting texts rather than evaluating the content knowledge of the subject. The results for each student when different methods were used were compared in order to evaluate if some of the methods for assessment gave similar results or if the methods induced differences in the results for the same student. We use ordination techniques to assess and visualize main trends in the data and linear models and classification trees to evaluate specific associations. There is correlation between results from several assessment methods, there are positive correlation between combinations of results from long answers, experiment and experiment construction, meaning students who showed good results with one method did so also with the others - but in some comparisons like long answer questions and multiple choice questions good results were independent of each other. There was a negative effect of having a non-Swedish mother tongue on the results in multiple choice questionnaires, but a positive effect of a non-Swedish mother tongue on the combined scores on experimental construction and experiment. Linear models show that good achievements in experimental construction are explained by high summed scores of Doll´s criteria, the four R’s richness, recursion, relations, and rigor.