Gaining conceptual knowledge instead of isolated facts is one of the major benefits of the German unified standards and curricula, which were acquired after German students showed dissatisfying results in international education studies such as TIMSS and PISA (KMK, 2005). Back then German teachers only scarcely interconnected new knowledge to contents of former biology lessons (Baumert et al., 1997). Newer studies e.g. by Wadouh and colleagues (2009) indicate that this still has not changed significantly. As the basis for teaching conceptual knowledge is an extensive conceptual knowledge base, respectively the ability of students to gain such a knowledge base at university, a multi-method approach was developed to gather university students' conceptual knowledge.

One of the three formats used in this quasi-longitudinal study (semester 1 and 5) is called Similarity Judgements Test (SJT). By judging the similarity of biological concepts on a scale, it should become clear how and how deeply the students' biology knowledge is interconnected (Großschedl & Harms, 2013). Furthermore, a concept mapping task should show how the students' knowledge is organized (Novak & Cañas, 2006). The quality of the knowledge structures shown by these two tests was estimated using an expert reference system. As a third format a sorting task was developed to find out whether students were able to select the biological concept correctly, which had to be activated to solve each of the 22 problems given. The aim of this project is to find out, whether the knowledge linking level increases during biology studies.

Goertzen, J. & Schmiemann, P. (2023). Bedeutsamkeiten biologischer Inhalte unterschiedlichen Abstraktionsgrads für das fachliche Professionswissen. In P. Schmiemann & S. Nitz (Eds.), Lehr- und Lernforschung in der Biologiedidaktik: Vol. 10. (pp. 47–60). Studienverlag.

Baumert, J., Lehmann, R., Lehrke, M., Schmitz, B., Clausen, M., Hosenfeld, I., Köller, O., Neubrand, J. (Hrsg.) (1997). TIMSS Mathematisch-naturwissenschaftlicher Unterricht im internationalen Vergleich. Deskriptive Befunde. Leske & Buderich. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-322-95096-3

Novak, J. D., & Cañas, A. J. (2006). The Theory Underlying Concept Maps and How to Construct Them. Technical Report IHMC CmapTools 2006 - 01.

Großschedl, J., & Harms, U. (2013). Assessing conceptual knowledge using similarity judgments. Studies in Educational Evaluation 39(2), 71–81. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.stueduc.2012.10.005

Konferenz der Kultusminister der Länder in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (KMK) (2005). Bildungsstandards im Fach Biologie für den Mittleren Schulabschluss. Luchterhand.

Wadouh, J., Sandmann, A., Neuhaus, B. (2009): Vernetzung im Biologieunterricht - deskriptive Befunde einer Videostudie. Zeitschrift für Didaktik der Naturwissenschaften, 15, 69–87.

This project was funded by the Interdisciplinary Center for Educational Research (IZfB) from 2016 to 2018. The author is responsible for the content of this publication.