This paper reports on a case study of undergraduate biology students' drawing-based modeling and how this process plays out in naturalistic dialogues. Recent research has revealed the importance of drawings, talk, and gestures in students' model-based reasoning. This study provides further insight into the complementary role of these multimodal representations in student' model-based reasoning. The empirical basis constitutes sequences of students' interactive modeling during a laboratory exercise targeted toward the molecular mechanism behind diagnostic tests. The analytical procedure involves a social-semiotic analysis of students' drawings and microanalyses of the sequences of student interaction while engaging with this modeling activity. Our findings reveal a pattern in the use of these representations and provide insights into their roles in students' model-based reasoning. During three critical episodes in the students' modeling process, we show how drawings, deictic gestures, talk, and iconic gestures in a recurring pattern contributed to bringing students' meaning-making forward: drawings contributed to opening a creative space for their reasoning, while explorative talk together with iconic gestures became an

The aim of this article is to understand biology teachers’ challenges with laboratory work in the light of tensions between the different cultures, or discourses, in biology teacher education. The data material in this study consists of a survey with 314 responses from biology teachers as well as a group interview. Our findings suggest that teachers struggle to transform the knowledge and experience from their pure biology education into their practice in the laboratory. Concepts from a scientific discourse, such as ‘hypothesis’ and ‘report’, are therefore integrated into traditional teacher-directed laboratory tasks where the results are given in advance. We argue that this contributes to a misleading image of science. One of the major challenges for teachers, we argue, is to design appropriate contexts for addressing aspects of nature of science in the laboratory. However, many biology teachers report that they lack knowledge about teaching methods in the laboratory.

The overall aim of this thesis is to explore challenges and opportunities with teaching and learning through scientific practices in the laboratory in biology education. This thesis is based on three articles that are introduced and discussed in an extended abstract. My focus is on practice in the laboratory, and in the thesis, I have investigated practice in two different ways. First, I have investigated upper secondary biology teachers’ practices as reported in a survey and group interview (Article I). Secondly, I have analyzed undergraduate biology students’ practices through microscale analysis of their reasoning when constructing representations in the laboratory (Article II and III). The findings from Article I show that the biology teachers’ primarily report that they implement teacher-directed laboratory work with the aim of illustrating content knowledge. The findings from Article II and III shows how different representations, such as drawings and gestures, support students’ model-based reasoning. Based on these findings, I argue for the fruitfulness of a focus on modelling through representation construction as a scientific practice in the laboratory.