Ilona Södervik

University of Helsinki | HY

This study combines longitudinal and individual process-level analyses to investigate medical students' biomedical knowledge and how they generate a diagnosis for a patient case text. The diagnostic processes were investigated using the eye-tracking method, and students' processes were compared with those of residents. The results showed that stude...

The aim of the study was to explore whether short online pedagogy courses can have an effect on university teachers’ interpretations of teaching–learning situations. Before and after participating in a short online pedagogical training programme, a total of 66 participants wrote their interpretations of two short video clips, which depicted a conte...

Journal name: International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education To support university students’ learning, teaching should build on students’ prior knowledge. Therefore, teachers need skills to pay attention to students’ knowledge in teaching-learning situations. Teachers’ underlying conceptual knowledge affects the way they see an...

This study investigates pharmacy students’ reasoning while solving a case task concerning an acute patient counselling situation in a pharmacy. Participants’ (N = 34) reasoning processes were investigated with written tasks utilizing eye-tracking in combination with verbal protocols. The case was presented in three pages, each page being followed b...

As students learn biology at different levels of education, their tenacious and inaccurate prior conceptions pose a challenge to conceptual change. Educators and researchers have developed a variety of interventions to address these misinterpretations and promote the achievement of current scientific understanding. Despite an ever-growing body of l...

Helsingin yliopistossa 9.2.2024 järjestetyn Ainedidaktisen symposiumin teemana oli perustaitojen opetus ja arviointi. Tapahtumassa tematiikkaa lähestyttiin monesta näkökulmasta. Symposiumissa käyty keskustelu ja tämän teoksen artikkelit osoittavat selvästi, että perustaitojen oppimiseen liittyy paitsi geneerisiä, myös oppiainespesifejä erityispiirt...

Pyrkimykset ratkaista kestävyysongelmia haastavat eri oppiaineiden opetuksen ja ope­tuksen tutkimuksen ottamaan huomioon kestävän kehityksen tavoitteet. Tässä kirjassa käsitellään biologian opetusta. Oleellinen kysymys on selvittää, miltä perustalta nousevat tavoitteet ja sisällöt opetukseen, jonka päämääränä on monipuolinen luonnontieteellinen siv...

Systems thinking is considered an important skill when teaching biology and sustainable development in the 21st century. The key to understanding biodiversity and thus sustainability in biology is understanding reproduction as a phenomenon. The aim of this study is to analyse student teachers' systems thinking levels regarding sustainability in con...

The importance of studies showing the impact of students' epistemic beliefs on their conceptual learning and academic progress is increasing. This study investigated pharmacy students’ domain-specific epistemic cognition and topic-specific beliefs related to their level of conceptual prior knowledge, learning and study progress during the first aca...

Pedagogical training has been seen as an efficient tool to train university teachers to understand and foster active learning. The aim of this study was to examine the effect of a short online pedagogical training course on the development of university teachers’ conceptions of active learning from two perspectives: the role of prior knowledge and...

This contributed volume addresses the issue of how higher education institutions can systematically reorient themselves to help society become more sustainable. In particular, a strategic management approach is used to overcome the fragmentation of sustainability initiatives increasingly conducted by higher education institutions worldwide. In this...

Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) worldwide are urged to transform their core activities to address sustainability crises. As HEIs are key actors in educating future decision-makers and experts, they are called upon to reform their education and curriculum to actualise the sustainability transformation needed. However, despite global and nationa...

Extensive research has been conducted on the misconceptions related to photosynthesis and respiration. However , most of these studies have failed to consider the heterogeneity of learners. In this study, latent profile analysis was used to determine the differences in students' understanding of biological concepts. Students' profiles were validate...

This study investigated how university teachers’ (mis)conceptions of teaching and learning are related to their ability to notice and interpret pedagogically significant incidents in the classroom, that is their professional vision. Additionally, we examined whether university teachers can be supported in their development of conceptual understandi...

The first study year at university predicts the progress and quality of later studies. The aim of our study was to explore factors that affect first-year agriculture students. In the end of their first year, 49 students answered a questionnaire measuring self-efficacy, approaches to learning, and study-related burnout. They also reported the factor...

A simple method to construct lexical networks (lexicons) of how students use scientific terms in written texts is introduced. The method is based on a recently introduced quantum semantics generalization of a word-pair co-occurrence. Quantum semantics allows entangled co-occurrence, thus allowing to model the effect of subjective bias on weighting...

An essential feature of pharmacy education is the teaching of theoretical knowledge with the support of practical work in the laboratory. When properly utilized, laboratory activities have the potential to enhance students’ achievement, conceptual understanding, and positive attitudes towards learning. In this pilot study, an augmented reality (AR)...

This study investigates the effects of a short pedagogical training on university teachers’ professional vision and (mis)conceptions concerning teaching and learning, utilizing a mixed-methods approach. Participants’ written interpretations of a video-based teaching–learning situation were analyzed and comparisons were made between prospective and...

Complex networks are often used to analyze written text and reports by rendering texts in the form of a semantic network, forming a lexicon of words or key terms. Many existing methods to construct lexicons are based on counting word co-occurrences, having the advantage of simplicity and ease of applicability. Here, we use a quantum semantics appro...

The learning of laboratory skills is essential in science education, but students often get too little individual guidance in this area. Augmented reality (AR) technologies are a promising tool to tackle this challenge and promote students’ high-level learning and performance in science laboratories. Thus, the purpose of this study was (1) to desig...

The purpose of this study is to increase the understanding about undergraduate life science students’ conceptions concerning the role of photosynthesizing plants in the ecosystem, utilizing a network analysis method. Science learning requires the integration and linking of abstract and often counterintuitive concepts successfully into multifaceted...

Understanding chemical models can be challenging for many university students studying chemistry. This study analysed students’ understanding of molecular structures using the Lewis structure as a model, and examined what hinders their understanding. We conducted pre- and post-tests to analyse students’ conceptions and changes in them. The measures...

Future experts of life sciencesLife sciences need adaptive and flexible reasoning skills in solving remarkably complex, multidisciplinary and unexpected problems, such as pandemics of severe infections, antibiotic resistance, climate change and biodiversity loss, that will require innovative ways of reasoning, and the ability to use knowledge and s...

In this study we investigated the effects of two naturalistic 2- to 4-year-old children’s intervention programs aimed at promoting children’s Spontaneous Focusing On Numerosity (SFON) and early numerical skills. The study consisted of a quasi-experimental, pretest-posttest design with a delayed posttest and an active control group participating in...

The varying level and quality of students’ prior knowledge pose a challenge for instruction at university. Because of the scarcity of studies in pharmacy, in this study, the prior knowledge on biosciences of first-year pharmacy students’ (N = 126) was measured at the beginning of the first study year with questionnaire comprising 10 multiple choice...

In this study, a simulated, VR-based environment was built and analyzed to explore if a VR environment can possess recovering effects. 61 university students tested a VR application depicting a forest and answered survey questions about the experience. The results showed that VR-environment can indeed have recovering effects. Moreover, when compari...

This study investigates professional development during medical studies from a conceptual change perspective. Medical students’ conceptual understanding and clinical reasoning concerning the central cardiovascular system were investigated during the first three years of study. Professional development was inspected from the perspectives of biomedic...

In this study, a simulated, VR-based environment was built and analyzed to explore if a VR environment can possess recovering effects. 61 university students tested a VR application depicting a forest and answered survey questions about the experience. The results showed that VR-environment can indeed have recovering effects. Moreover, when compari...

In this study, firstly, university biology students’ conceptual understanding and potential misconceptions concerning meiosis were studied. Secondly, an easily applicable drawing task was used to foster students’ metaconceptual awareness which would help them to reach conceptual change. A quasi-experimental design with a non-equivalent control grou...

This study used the eye-tracking method to explore how the level of expertise influences reading, and solving, two written patient cases on cardiac failure and pulmonary embolus. Eye-tracking is a fairly commonly used method in medical education research, but it has been primarily applied to studies analyzing the processing of visualizations, such...

University students’ understanding of photosynthesis was examined in a large introductory biosciences class. The focus of this study was to first examine the conceptions of photosynthesis among students in class and then to investigate how a certain type of text could enhance students’ understanding of photosynthesis. The study was based on pre- an...

The purpose of this study was to investigate elementary school pre-service teachers’ understanding of photosynthesis and to examine if a refutational text can support understanding of photosynthesis better than a non-refutational text. A total of 91 elementary school pre-service teachers read either a refutational or a non-refutational text concern...

Medical students often have initial understanding concerning medical domains, such as the central cardiovascular system (CCVS), when they enter the study programme. These notions may to some extent be in conflict with scientific understanding, which can be seen as a challenge for medical teaching. Hence, the purpose of this study was to analyse wha...

The purpose of this study was to examine conceptual change among future elementary school teachers while studying a scientific text concerning photosynthesis. Students' learning goals in relation to their learning outcomes were also examined. The participants were future elementary school teachers. The design consisted of pre- and post-tests. The s...

Novice medical students usually hold initial conceptions concerning medical domains, such as the cardiovascular system, which may contradict scientific explanations and thus hinder learning. The purpose of this study was to investigate which kinds of biomedical representations medical students constructed of the central cardiovascular system in the...

The aim of the study was to investigate the role of regulation and processing strategies in understanding science text. A total of 91 student teachers answered open-ended questions concerning photosynthesis before and after reading either a traditional or a refutational science text. After this, they also answered parts of the Inventory of Learning...