Chapter 8 - Investigating Abstractness and Motivation as Scaffolding Elements in Biology Lesson Planning. An Explorative Study

Abstract

In this chapter, we focus on lesson planning as one general competence that the biology education program at the University of Tübingen in Germany and the South African University of the Witwatersrand's School of Education (WSoE) aim to develop in teaching students. We first provide an overview of biology teacher education at Wits and Tübingen. We then present a case study in which teaching methods based on the cone of learning and practical teaching methods at Tübingen University are implemented for the school topic ‘ecology and evolution’. We provide the results of a lesson plan analysis, showing that only about half of the students at Tübingen University were able to apply the knowledge from the introductory lecture to their practical lesson plans.