Resumen de Ecosystems in science education research in the last 20 years: A research synthesis
Pedro Lucha López, María José Sáez Bondía
Ecosystems constitute a central topic in biology education and research syntheses can be useful to identify central issues in a particular research field. The present work aims to identify the characteristics of ecosystem-related investigations published by European researchers in science education journals for the last 20 years, as well as their numbers. It is remarkable that there is a scarcity of articles about ecosystems contextualized in preschool, and a high number of them in high school. The amount of papers devoted to evaluate students’ ideas and learnings is similar to that of articles focused on the investigation of teaching and learning strategies and tools. On the other hand, attitudes are a less-evaluated aspect of learning, and biogeochemical cycles are the most scarcely considered ecosystem elements in the analysed articles. Finally, there seems to be some kind of relationship between the ecosystem elements explicitly mentioned in the papers and the educational level where they are contextualized. Thus, complex ideas and relations of ecosystems are scarcely represented in papers dealing with elementary or preschool learners, and they concentrate in studies contextualized in high school and higher educational levels. In our opinion, this result reinforces the systems thinking approach.
