Improving Conceptual Understanding in Biology through Storytelling

Introduction

Over the last decades, several scholars examined the understanding of biological topics. Consistently, they reported that some theories are hard to grasp for students at any stage of their educational careers (Bishop & Anderson, 1990; Garvin-Doxas & Klymkowsky, 2008). Only recently, a team of researchers showed that also students at ETH do not comprehend various fundamental biological concepts. As underlying reasons, they suggested isolated teaching, the rule-based nature of natural science education, and the teleological mindsets of students as leading causes for the retention of misconceptions (Champagne Queloz et al., 2016).

Teleological thinking thereby refers to a way of sense-making in which a person assumes a purpose in a random process. Following this mode of argumentation, a plant, for example, either adapts itself or goes extinct upon climate change, even though, in reality, random processes lead to individual differences in the population, and the randomly best-adapted individuals have the highest chance of survival.

While numerous teaching approaches aim to tackle misconceptions, research findings also indicate that the deployed instructional methods often fail to resolve misconceptions or teleological beliefs (Champagne Queloz et al., 2016; Fiedler et al., 2017).

A yet only sparsely explored field of instructional methods is the use of storytelling. While the available literature suggests a slightly positive effect of narratives on understanding, the results from studies conducted at the university level unveil fewer insights (Dai et al., 2021; M. Wolfe & Mienko, 2007).

Nevertheless, and independent of the level of education, learning improves upon integrating similar ideas in various disciplines, including prior knowledge and social environment (Figure 1) (Brown et al., 1989). Although instructional methods in higher education neglect these aspects of knowledge acquisition, they are essential for conceptual understanding and change. Narratives as a pedagogical tool combine scientific ideas with stories, thereby providing a social context and connecting to or competing with personal experiences (Arya & Maul, 2012; Posner et al., 1982). This intrinsic scaffold could also helps students seeing relationships between assumedly diverse topics in different disciplines.