Approaches to biology teaching and learning: understanding the wrong answers—teaching toward conceptual change

We live in a time when the seeds of change in science education have borne fruit all around us. The rhetoric of the calls for change issued by national scientific societies and agencies is supported by the reality of compelling examples of change, accomplished by scientists who have rethought the way they teach, the way they think about teaching, and the way they define themselves as science educators (Handelsman et al., 2004; Project Kaleidoscope, 2004). The seeds have germinated in some potentially rocky soil—including the graduate and postdoctoral training programs that generate future scientists (Luft et al., 2004). For many of us who received our preparation for what we now do as educators before those seeds were sown, however, our graduate and postdoctoral programs may have done justice only to our future roles as research scientists. Ou