To develop effective teaching materials, evaluation of the effect on student is important. In this study, we developed a quantitative evaluation method for student comprehension, the analysis of texts underlined by students; we conducted a questionnaire survey for high school students to evaluate a schematic figure that explains the relationship between evolution and phylogenetics. The students were divided into two groups; one group was given an illustration that described the outline of the symbiotic and the three-domain theory, while the other was not. Both groups of the students read texts about evolution and phylogenetics. Then, students answered questions regarding evolution and phylogenetics. Students were also asked to underline sentences in the texts which they felt were interesting, important, or unintelligible. The results indicate that many of the first-year high school students that were given the illustration, provided incorrect answers to the question about the relationship between symbiotic and three domain theories. Furthermore, the analysis of the underlined texts revealed that many of the students tended to feel that they cannot understand texts about phylogenetics, even if they viewed the illustration. These results suggested that an improvement of teaching materials, such as additional guidance, might be necessary, and that this evaluation method, which is based on analysis of the underlined texts, can be used to evaluate and improve various teaching materials.

In Japan, the course of study has been revised; the goal is to develop observation and experimentation skills as well as scientific exploration abilities through the process of inquiry, thereby highlighting the importance of learning through inquiry. In this study, I analyzed ten basic biology textbooks for upper secondary school students, to investigate how the inquiry process was treated and what kind of inquiry processes were shown in each experiment. The description of inquiry process was different in each textbook. The noticeable difference was whether the first process included students’ questions or the learning process. The experiments described in the textbooks were roughly divided into “research activities” and “observations and experiments.” The new course of study shows there are 8 processes in the inquiry process. It was found that 85% of the “research activities” in the textbooks described 6 processes. However, only about 20% of “research activities” covered all of the processes and many of the “observations and experiments” were limited to the process of searching for issues. Therefore, in order to develop scientific inquiry skills, it is necessary to combine multiple “research activities” to make up for the missing processes. From now on, in order to change from a lesson where knowledge is taught by a teacher to a class where students find issues, it is necessary to improve learning through the inquiry process.

In biological education at high schools in Japan, students are to learn biotechnology with experiencing concrete methods and techniques. However, experiments using biotechnology have not been conducted sufficiently due to high cost of equipment such as thermal cyclers in PCR. In this study, we developed an inexpensive and simple PCR method, in which heat retaining soup containers were used instead of a thermal cycler. Our results showed that DNA fragments were amplified without controlling the temperature by considering following three points; (1) suppression of temperature decrease in the containers for DNA denaturation, (2) lowering of the lower limit temperature of DNA denaturation, (3) shortening of the PCR program. In addition, all undergraduate students who conducted the PCR method succeeded in amplifying DNA fragments. It is thus expected that this method can be accepted at high schools as a useful teaching material.

Seed germination scheme of cereal plants is cited in the biology textbooks for high school, but there is no description on the basis of experimental demonstration. In this paper, we describe a new set of experimental teaching materials to support the learning of germination process in rice seeds. Six experiments were included in the set: (1) Detection of amylase activity in germinating seeds, (2) Induction of amylase activity in embryoless half-seeds by the application of 1 μM gibberellin, (3) Inhibition of germination and amylase synthesis by 40 μM uniconazole (inhibitor of gibberellin production), (4) Detection of amylase activity in the aleurone layer isolated from germinating seeds, (5) Detection of amylase secreted from isolated aleurone layer during culture, (6) Inhibition of germination and amylase synthesis by the application of 40 μM abscisic acid. This series of experiments would be helpful to better understanding concerning the roll of gibberellin function in seed germination, the tissue sites of amylase synthesis and action in germinating seeds, and antagonism between gibberellin and abscisic acid during germination process.