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

Abstract

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 qua-litative study explores PSTs’ conceptual understanding and miscon-ceptions through an eight-week elective seminar course, wherereflective journals were analysed using qualitative content analysis.An IFES conceptual framework was developed, and a rubric-basedevaluation assessed PSTs’ learning progress, followed by a heatmapvisualisation of their conceptual development. Findings reveal thatdeterministic reasoning persists, particularly in gene expression,inheritance, and environmental regulation of genes. Many PSTs over-simplify protein synthesis, misunderstand RNA’s role, and demon-strate limited awareness of epigenetic mechanisms. While someconceptual improvements were observed, none of the PSTs achievedthe highest level of integration in any IFES category, highlighting theneed for improved instructional strategies in teacher education pro-grammes. This study contributes to biology teacher education byintroducing an IFES rubric and framework to assess and enhancePSTs’ genetics comprehension. The findings suggest that inquiry-based learning, explicit discussions of misconceptions, and interdis-ciplinary approaches could support deeper conceptual integration.Future research should examine longitudinal interventions with lar-ger, multi-site samples to confirm these patterns and to betteraddress PSTs’ persistent misconceptions and improve geneticsinstruction in teacher preparation programmes.