biology assignment help in australia

biology assignment help in australia

Enhancing Biology Education in Australia: Challenges and Opportunities

1. Introduction to Biology Education in Australia

Although the talent of a population cannot be measured with unerring certainty, clever and Australians with outstanding problem-solving abilities are highly valued and, in fact, form a key feature of the “clever country”. While these attributes are gained through many years of attentive support from parents, teachers, and institutions, it is only through high-quality education that they are developed. In Australia, education is provided by a variety of sectors and tailored to various needs, with much of the foundation of biology education occurring in these different settings. These sectors contribute to the full potential of all Australians in many ways. This biosystem is comprised of two inter-related components: the student population plus their teachers at all levels in their educational progression; and a finite set of infrastructure, teaching resources, and expertise that are required and which must be used effectively to build student skills and knowledge. Both components of the biosystem operate in an economic and social context.

Biology is a fundamental and rapidly expanding science underpinning professional disciplines with enormous influence on the social and economic wellbeing of Australian society. Many of the most important debates that affect Australia rely in part on biology education and understanding. The teaching of biology is provided by several sectors and tailored to particular needs, and the curriculum in each sector is often modified to suit subpopulations. Many types of challenges exist in the enhancement and nurturing of biology knowledge and understanding, and subsequent teaching at each level of biology education. Furthermore, a finite set of resources is available from which to address these challenges.

2. Current Challenges in Biology Education

Despite the increasing number of new science graduates, concerns are being raised about the quality and relevance of the biology education that they receive. Declining enrollments in biology courses, particularly in fields such as botany and ecology, remain a significant challenge for biology educators. Other challenges arise from where the students learn biology and the consequences this has for the disciplinary literacies of biology graduates. For example, biomedical and/or human health contexts dominate the tertiary curriculum, but not necessarily the life experiences of undergraduate biology students. Further, student diversity has expanded, with concomitant implications for academic, social, and economic equity in higher education, and an urgency to broaden the employment prospects for life science graduates. In the following sections, we elaborate these present challenges for the future of biology education in Australia and beyond.

3. Innovative Approaches and Best Practices

BIOL 1978 is delivered using a combination of print materials and online support facilities. Students enrolled at James Cook University can choose to work through the print materials at their own pace and at their own location and use the study materials and resources found on the Internet. There are, however, some workshops that students must attend. The aims are to give students feedback on selected self-study problems, to provide an opportunity to practice exam-type questions, and to offer advice on completing the assessment requirements. Practical work can be completed in the student’s home area, at times convenient to the student. Practical work includes the dissection and examination of a key high-health-status carcass, the scrutiny of diseases with visual field signs, and the analysis of reports of suspect notifiable diseases. Various sources of student feedback have been utilized in the development of BIOL 1978.

A key issue in the design of biology education is the provision of personalized, stimulating content and innovative and world-class learning materials. There are three main access points to interactions between educators and learners: schools, vocational education facilities, and universities. However, universities have perhaps the best opportunity to provide a world-class biology education to all Australians. The Notifiable Diseases Program is an electronics-based learning program offered at James Cook University in North Queensland. It is a model designed to provide all Australians with a prospective professional interest in the health of their work and residential communities.

4. The Role of Technology in Biology Education

As we have said, biology is a science of observation, and nothing can replace seeing things in the flesh. An array of observations can be made with field-based practical work or by visiting specialist biology environments, including zoos, museum collections, gardens, greenhouses, and wild areas. Museums and libraries are potential sites of interaction and interpretation, not just places to visit, emphasizing the role of social interaction in learning and the importance of creating a demand side of education that is responsive to the supply side initiatives from schools and universities. We note that opportunities for training programs, curriculum development, model building, and research could readily be designed to exploit these diverse resources.

There is great excitement worldwide about the potential of educational technology such as immersive and virtual reality environments, and our schools are investing heavily in these and other learning technologies. Indeed, Australia now invests more per school per year on technology and computers (A$3,200) than on any other material resource. While biology is about real and living things, these technologically motivated initiatives raise interesting questions about how technology and biology intersect, whether they are being used wisely, and what international experience might tell us about how technology can be optimally used to shape how biology is taught and learned.

5. Recommendations for Improving Biology Education in Australia

We also recommend that postgraduate students in schools be used, more widely, in schools, to mentor students in their literacy skills while at the same time stimulating the growth of physics and technology in this country. The schools are telling us that these students are valuable, but the DETYA removed the funding for the continuation of such positions in schools. Their continued employment would stimulate the postgraduate students to improve their communication skills in English and hence make them more competitive in the international market. The recommendation seems consistent with the industrial relevance of postgraduate training as advocated by the recently released Nebraska Roundtable on Science and Technology. The use of postgraduate profiling of a larger scale should also increase the female and mature age postgraduate student population. We also recommend the adoption within schools of an investigation and project-based broader curriculum that involves biology, and a more flexible use of an undergraduate degree that addresses the work-based and professional development needs of the members of the Australian Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) workforce. This would appear consistent with the five ‘C’ principles that underpin the Victorian post-compulsory educational curriculum. A more flexible education curriculum should provide an alternative entry point for teachers and other qualified professionals from unemployment, retirement or family leave.

We present here some broad recommendations, which draw on the information and insights derived from our research, in order to achieve a positive, constructive change for the future. To address the concerns raised in schools regarding the place of science subjects in which student numbers will impact on the breadth of the offering in the sciences, the immediate introduction of policies that will restore in the short term the number of high school students taking biology and science subjects. We recommend, as a start, the immediate removal of the double counting of subjects for school and university, requiring high schools to allocate their resources to those science subjects that have been hit by the policy. We further recommend surveys of teachers of biology and science in high schools to determine precisely the extent of the problem and the identification of possible policies that may act to restore the numbers to the current levels of demand. The research methodology could draw from the past Victorian science education surveys or the development of a modified ‘Imbalance Ratio’, which is a statistic developed by ACER to identify the degrees of imbalance in the supply of VCE within schools.