From reflection to framework: investigating biology pre-service teachers’ understanding of genetic information flow, exchange, and storage (IFES)

OpenAlex İngilizce

Understanding genetic information flow, exchange, and storage (IFES) is essential in biology education, yet pre-service teachers (PSTs) often struggle with these core concepts. This small-scale qualitative study explores PSTs’ conceptual understanding and misconceptions through an eight-week elective seminar course, where reflective journals were analysed using qualitative content analysis. An IFES conceptual framework was developed, and a rubric-based evaluation assessed PSTs’ learning progress, followed by a heatmap visualisation of their conceptual development. Findings reveal that deterministic reasoning persists, particularly in gene expression, inheritance, and environmental regulation of genes. Many PSTs oversimplify protein synthesis, misunderstand RNA’s role, and demonstrate limited awareness of epigenetic mechanisms. While some conceptual improvements were observed, none of the PSTs achieved the highest level of integration in any IFES category, highlighting the need for improved instructional strategies in teacher education programmes. This study contributes to biology teacher education by introducing an IFES rubric and framework to assess and enhance PSTs’ genetics comprehension. The findings suggest that inquiry-based learning, explicit discussions of misconceptions, and interdisciplinary approaches could support deeper conceptual integration. Future research should examine longitudinal interventions with larger, multi-site samples to confirm these patterns and to better address PSTs’ persistent misconceptions and improve genetics instruction in teacher preparation programmes.