“Biological diversity is the key to the maintenance of the world as we know it,” says E.O. Wilson in his book titled The Diversity of Life. Yet, why is it that students struggle to understand key aspects of biological diversity, such as change over time and consequences of biodiversity loss?

Results/Conclusions

Analyses of assessments from hundreds of K-12 students have led us to hypothesize that students a) fail to recognize structural and behavior differences between individuals in a population and between species in an ecosystem and b) fail to make the important connection between organismal traits and their contribution to the fitness of an individual in a set of environmental conditions. As educators, we aim to teach students large scale processes, such as succession, evolution and species extinction, which are complex, and relatively “invisible” to students. If students don’t understand structure-function relationships regarding individual organisms, it may be nearly impossible for them to reason about the larger scale processes.