Abstract
<p style="text-align:justify">A large number of articles in the field of science education reflect on scientific literacy as the main goal of science education (SE), although often with varying viewpoints. Nevertheless, researchers have begun to highlight subject-specific teaching practices that are expected to specifically enhance science subject teaching, including biology. The main aim of this theoretical article is to come on consensus and to conceptualise the term biological literacy (BL) more clearly and to present a theoretical concept of BL, composed on the basis of systematically analysed articles. This theoretical concept includes two dimensions of BL: (1) cognitive (cognitive skills, conceptual understanding, biological inquiry) and (2) affective dimension, based on systematic literature review (SLR). This theoretical concept also includes in addition four dimensions of BL: (3) sustainability; (4) interdisciplinarity, (5) career awareness and (6) nature of biology (NOB), based on literature review (LR) of recent decades, that was conducted to write theoretical overview of this research.</p>
Highlights
Biology is a fundamental and applied science discipline, which is expanding at a very high rate and plays an important role in our understanding of life at every level – from the molecular biology level to interactions on the global scale (Duncan & Boerwinkel, 2018; Reiss & Kampourakis, 2018)
This is despite the fact that 7 articles on biological literacy (BL), included into the systematic literature review (SLR), were published in last century and 31 in the 21st century, indicated that the concept of BL, defined in 1994 by Uno and Bybee, needed to be updated, According to the findings of systematic literature review, 7 different components of BL were outlined and validated by the expert group of three biology teachers and three biology education (BE) researchers
Systematic review of articles dealing with biological literacy revealed that the term “biological literacy” was introduced already in 1954 by Riddle but the comprehensive concept of BL was created by Uno and Bybee (1994)
Summary
Biology is a fundamental and applied science discipline, which is expanding at a very high rate and plays an important role in our understanding of life at every level – from the molecular biology level to interactions on the global scale (Duncan & Boerwinkel, 2018; Reiss & Kampourakis, 2018). In this respect, it is not surprising that 21st century biology education (BE) encompasses extensive new concepts and methods when compared with the previous century, e.g. genetic engineering methods. SL is an extremely broad term and encompasses literacies within the different natural sciences sub-components, such as geography/earth science, biology/life science, physics and chemistry (Bybee, 2009; Demir, 2016; Fives et al, 2014)
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