The effectiveness of a teaching approach using brain-based learning elements on students’ performance in a Biology course

Abstract Brain-Based Learning (BBL) is an educational theoretical framework based on principles that derive from important findings about the structure and function of the brain through biology, psychology, and neuroscientific research, and forms a holistic context for a comprehensive instructional approach design. In the present study, a teaching intervention, using BBL elements, was designed and its effectiveness on secondary students’ performance in a Biology course was assessed. A quasi-experimental research design, using pretest and posttest, was implemented, involving an experimental group and a control group of seventh-grade students from a public mainstream school. The results revealed that the students of the experimental group had a significantly higher mean score than the students of the control group on an achievement test, which was delivered as post-test, indicating that the suggested teaching approach had a positive effect on the students’ improvement in academic performance. These results are discussed in the context of improving teaching practices, and supporting the use of BBL elements in constructing more efficient teaching practices for Biology courses.


Introduction
It is commonly known that the teaching process in a school class comprises one of the most significant and fundamental contexts that the brain interacts with, by sensory, cognitive, ABOUT THE AUTHORS Nektarios Lagoudakis holds a Master's degree in Didactics of Biology, and is a secondary school teacher of natural sciences. He conducts his PhD research in the Department of Special Education, at the University of Thessaly, Greece. Filippos Vlachos, is a Professor of Psychobiology in the Department of Special Education, at the University of Thessaly, Greece, where he has taught and conducted research since 1997. His research interests concern, the psychobiological and neuropsychological approaches of learning and developmental disabilities as well as the relationship between brain laterality and cognitive abilities. Vasilia Christidou, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Early Childhood Education, at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. Her research interests include teaching and learning in science, scientific literacy, recontextualization of scientific texts addressed to non-experts, public images of science and scientists, and gender issues in science education. Denis Vavougios, is a Professor of Physics and Science Education in the Department of Physics, School of Science, at the University of Thessaly, Greece. emotional, and social experiences, promoting in essence individuals' learning. A complex and continually changing school and social world creates the necessity of the development and the optimization of educational practices and programs in order to fulfill the learning needs of every student.
The importance of neuroscientific findings in school instruction has been supported by many academic researchers, educators, and neuroscientists during the last decades (Blakemore & Frith, 2005;Buzan, 1974;Hart, 1983;Willis, 2007). An ambitious and innovative project was launched by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2002) with the intention to encourage the cooperation between the sciences of education and brain research, acknowledging the difficulties and the challenges of a venture like that on the one hand, but also the high benefits that it will bear on the other. This thesis leads to the emergence of a new scientific field which attempts to bridge the gap between neuroscience and education, by proposing research-based ways of how contemporary knowledge about anatomy and physiology of the brain and learning processes can be applied to the whole educational spectrum, improving the instructional practices (Vlachos, 2018). The attainment of a functional conflation of the neuroscience psychology and education has been characterized by relatively diversified approaches, which are mentioned with various terminologies, such as brainbased learning, educational neuroscience, neuroeducation, and mind brain and education (Battro et al., 2008;Jensen, 2008;Thomas & Swamy, 2014;Tokuhama-Espinosa, 2011).
Many researchers have pointed out the difficulty of an efficient transfer of neuroscience findings into classroom practice, stressing at the same time the need for more research and experimentation in a real classroom context. To deal with this challenge, they have proceeded to the distillation of a plethora of neuroscientific findings, focusing on a core set of neuroscience concepts, which could enrich and support teachers' understanding about learning process, enabling them to tap into pedagogical choices that stem from this understanding for designing courses (Churches et al., 2017;Dubinsky et al., 2013;Schwartz et al., 2019;Tokuhama-Espinosa, 2011). However, in a literature review of educational interventions and approaches, informed by neuroscience, Howard-Jones (2014) suggests that there are three types of these approaches. Those that, according to current findings, are likely to have a positive impact on educational attainment and are therefore worth testing at a large scale, those that need further testing to determine their likely impact on educational attainment, and finally, those that do not seem to have a promising impact on educational effort.
Despite the increasing use of various contemporary educational equipment and teaching tools in teaching practices, the structure of a lesson plan is very essential to conform with the brain needs in order to be brain-compatible rather than brain-antagonistic (Hart, 1983). Brain-Based Learning (BBL) is an educational theoretical framework, based on principles, that derives from important findings about the structure and function of the brain through biology, psychology, and neuroscientific research, and forms a holistic context for a comprehensive instructional approach design (Caine & Caine, 1994;Jensen, 2008). It proposes the ideal use of various learning tasks and instructional techniques for being more effective in the way they promote the optimal capitalization of students' innate cognitive capacities, by enhancing the natural brain function mechanisms. Additionally, BBL ensures an enriched learning environment that enables the brain to learn in a natural way, helping at the same time each student to be involved in the learning process with her/his own way (Caine & Caine, 1994;Jensen, 2008;Sousa, 2017).
The Brain-based learning framework was originally founded on 12 principles that Caine and Caine (1994) and Caine et al. (2005) have formulated: (1) Brain is a parallel processor, (2) Learning engages the entire physiology, (3) The search for meaning is innate, (4) The search for meaning occurs through patterning, (5) Emotions are critical to patterning, (6) Every brain simultaneously perceives and creates parts and wholes, (7) Learning involves both focused attention and peripheral attention, (8) Learning always involves conscious and unconscious processes, (9) We have at least two types of memory systems: spatial and rote learning, (10) The brain understands and remembers best when facts and skills are embedded in the natural spatial memory, (11) Learning is enhanced by challenge and inhibited by threat, (12) Every brain is unique.
The above principles support three pedagogically significant teaching elements that are used as a guidance for selecting and preparing learning environments: i) Relaxed alertness: reaching an optimum state of mind/brain through the creation of a calm learning environment with low feeling/sense of threat and high challenge. ii) Orchestrated immersion: meaning an enriched learning environment by exposing students to a variety of instructional techniques, learning tasks and various modes of approaching knowledge in general, in order to have opportunities for involvement and elaboration. iii) Active processing: the state of internalization, making sense, and consolidation of learning experience and learning material, through reflection and creatively combinational practices (Caine & Caine, 1994).
Studies have shown that BBL has a positive effect on students' various academic features, such as achievement and retention of knowledge (Duman, 2010;Mekarina & Ningsih, 2017;Thomas & Swamy, 2014;Uzezi & Jonah, 2017), motives (Saleh, 2012;Uzezi & Jonah, 2017), creativity (Ramakrishnan & Annakodi, 2015), and conceptual change (Saleh, 2012). In addition, similar findings have emerged from a small number of studies, concerning Biology courses. More specifically, the organization of a learning environment with activities designed on the basis of BBL principles, for selected units in Biology, had a significant effect on increasing secondary-educationlevel students' academic achievement, ranging from 11 to 14 years of age (Varghese & Pandya, 2016;Vyas & Vashishtha, 2013). The instruction of the unit "substance transportation in cells" with BBL activities in the ninth grade increased student achievement but it did not create any difference in their attitudes towards the Biology course (Aydin & Yel, 2011). Although the general instructional designs in the above studies are based on BBL, as far as the individual lessons planning, learning activities, and teaching tools are concerned, there are differences among them, depending on the students' grade, scientific subject, and cognitive abilities that are under research.
As there is need for more experimentation and research on effectively fusing basic neuroscientific concepts with instructional interventions, concerning the subject of Biology in a variety of units and curricula, the aim of this study was to assess the effectiveness of a teaching intervention, designed according to the BBL elements on secondary students' performance in a Biology course. Based on the findings mentioned above, our hypothesis was that the students instructed with the BBL teaching approach would have a better academic performance than the students exposed to a conventional way of teaching.

Method
A research design of quasi-experimental approach was implemented, involving an experimental group (EG) and a control group (CC), in order to evaluate the effectiveness of a teaching approach, based on the principles of BBL, on the academic achievement of secondary students in a Biology course.

Ethical considerations
The study was approved by the research ethics committee of the University of Thessaly which conforms to the declaration of Helsinki. Participation in the study was based on informed consent. All tests were anonymously completed by the students, and appropriate codes were used for the data processing.

Participants
A total of 97 seventh-grade students, 53 male and 44 females (age range 12-13 years, M = 12.47 years, SD = 0.30 years) from a public mainstream school in Athens, Greece, participated in this study. The researcher was an active teacher in the school and based on the availability of the sample, a convenience sampling approach was employed (Cohen et al., 2007;Creswell, 2012). Two of the classes consisting of 48 students (M = 12.43 years, SD = 0.29 years) served as the experimental group (EG), and the other two consisting of 49 (M = 12.51 years, SD = 0.31 years) students served as the control group (CC). An independent samples t-test showed that there was no statistical difference between the mean age of the two groups (t = 1.28, p > .05, 2-tailed).

Instrument and data collection
An achievement test, consisting in its final form of a total of 24 items, was used to evaluate students' academic-performance on science knowledge during the pretest and posttest phase. Twenty of them were multiple-choice items and four were open-ended questions requiring short answers to be provided by the students. The content of the testing instrument was determined by the scientific concepts and procedures, referred to the teaching unit "Intake of Substances and Digestion" in the student textbook. The number of multiplechoice item corresponded to a great range of the teaching material attempting an adequate coverage of the unit. For the instrument construction, we took into consideration specific norms, mentioned in the bibliography, in order to assess student cognitive faculties, concerning the level of knowledge, apprehension, and composition (Haladyna, 2004;Miller et al., 2009;Tamir, 1971Tamir, , 1991.
The items were aligned with the learning objectives, as prescribed by the National Greek Curriculum for the subject of Biology, taught in the first grade of middle school and their content validity was assessed by a team of experts. A pilot implementation of the instrument to a sample of 22 students of the same grade, the previous school year, revealed a value of 0.744 for the internal consistency factor Cronbach's alpha. The scientifically adequate response of each multiple choice scored with 1 point and each open-ended question could be marked from 0 to 3 points, depending on the scientific adequacy of the answer. The maximum score of the instrument, if all responses were correct, would amount to 32 points.

Procedure
The achieving test was administered as a pretest before and as a post-test two months after the teaching intervention phase, both to the experimental and control groups, during a class session period. The post-test also served as a retention test, since along with the relatively large span of the first completion, the question order of the posttest was changed in order to diminish possible recollection effects. The intervention program lasted seven consequent weeks, since one class session per week was provided for the instruction of the Biology subject in the first grade of the middle school. That makes a total of seven class sessions in 7 weeks for the unit "Intake of Substances and Digestion," the instruction of which was scheduled at the middle of the first term of the school year according to the National Curriculum. The choice of the specific unit was made randomly because access to the school for implementing the instructional interventions was possible during that period. The instruction of the whole unit, was carried out in seven class sessions of 45 min duration each, for both the control and the experimental groups, using the conventional approach for the control and the BBL one for the experimental team respectively. Both instructional approaches were implemented by the same teacher.

BBL instructional approach
The BBL intervention program (Table 1) included seven learning episodes (lessons; Sousa, 2017) and it was developed on the basis of the BBL principles (Caine & Caine, 1994) and the integration of enriched proposals from other authors that have been referred to the aforementioned teaching approach (Jensen, 2008;Saleh, 2012;Smith, 2003;Sousa, 2017). A learning episode consisted of seven-instruction phases, which proceeded in specific order and were organized in three distinct attentional time zones (prime time 1-down time-prime time 2) according to the first-middle-last rule based on the serial position effect (Sousa, 2017).
Prime time 1-period of optimum attention of approximately 20 mins, including the three first instructional phases (1. introduction-activation-2. preparation-3. exposure-immersion-meaning creation). At the beginning of this stage, the induction of curiosity and anticipation for the new learning material into a positive and pleasant atmosphere, ensuring stress reduction, was attempted by conducting a brief experiment, or projecting appropriate cartoons and pictures relevant to teaching subject depending on the case. Subsequently, an overview of the new learning topic was given by the teacher with the introduction of the learning objectives. Recollection of the students' prior knowledge was of great importance for the new concepts and procedure apprehension, resulting in the creation of new connections. Answering a brief questionnaire or writing a short paragraph of what they knew about the theme that was to be taught served the above purpose. The students' exposure on the new information was carried out using appropriate constructed audiovisual material, simulations, models, and working sheets completion in order to attempt a balanced activation of the two hemispheres, in the context of a whole brain didactic approach. In the present phase, the students' active involvement by means of questions, predictions, explanatory comments, and discussion was induced.
Down time-period of reduced attention of approximately 13 mins, including the fourth and fifth instructional phases (4. Process-Application of instructional activities −5. Incubationmemory encoding). This stage started with a brief break of relaxation where the students' had the opportunity of movement and calm conversation with classical music playing in the background. The main points of this time zone were the organization and the process of the teaching information with the use of various tasks, exercises, and practice techniques, in order to enhance student memory capacity and achieve more effective encoding and storage (Sousa, 2017). Students were involved in various learning tasks such as concept map construction, identification of similarities and dissimilarities between different procedures and concepts, and they were asked to search for the relation between structure and function in biological entities in cases that it was feasible.
Prime time 2-the period of good attention of a 12 min timespan approximately includes the sixth and seventh instructional phases (6. Corroboration-self-confidence check 7. Integration-digestion) that proceeded with the closure of the learning episode. This stage aimed at students' satisfaction by verifying new knowledge and creating personal meaning through a knowledge transfer process in daily situations and utilization on future instructional situations (Hung, 2013;Jensen, 2008;Perkins & Salomon, 1988;Sousa, 2017). Students were encouraged to give explanations about daily situations and phenomena or to solve problems using the newly acquired knowledge on appropriately constructed work sheets. Additionally, the participation in quiz games and the use of assessment tests served both as a feedback for evaluating the degree of knowledge acquisition and understanding and as a revision for strengthening new information consolidation.

Conventional instructional approach
The conventional teaching approach, applied to the control group, included three instructional steps. The lecture started with students' oral examination concerning the learning material which had been taught in the previous lesson. The teacher asked various questions giving appropriate time for facilitating students' reflection before answering in order to evaluate the extent of the previous learning subject understanding. A whole class discussion followed where clarifications and explanations were given by the teacher on students' questions and misinterpretations. The second step concerned students' exposure to the new material, mainly by lecturing, with the use of audiovisual materials, theoretical explanations, analytical comments and examples, and brief discussions. In the third step, students are involved in various tasks such as quizzes, worksheets, and questions in order to consolidate new knowledge.

Results
In order to evaluate the equivalence of the Experimental and the Control Groups academic performances, before the instructional intervention phase, the mean scores of the two groups in the pretest were compared, using an independent sample t-test (Table 2). Although the CG mean score (8.47) was about one point lower than that of the EG (9.23), the results of the t-test showed that there was no statistical difference between them (t = 1.05, p > .05, 2-tailed).
After the completion of the teaching interventions, both the control and the experimental groups had an improvement in the achievement test during the post-test phase. As Table 3 indicates, both groups (CG and EG) had an increasing shift of 3.57 (from 8.47 to 12.04) and 6.96 (from 9.23 to 16.19) points in the CG and EG mean correspondingly, in a maximum score of 32.
However, there was a larger improvement in the experimental group performance, since its mean score was at 4.15 points higher than that of the control group. To examine the effectiveness of the two different teaching approaches, an independent t-test sample was employed to compare the two groups post-test mean scores (Table 4). The result showed that there was a significant statistical difference (t = 4.42, p < .001, 2-tailed) between the EG mean score (M = 16.19, SD = 5.23) and the CG score (M = 12.04, SD = 3.16) indicating that the teaching approach, based on the BBL principles, was more effective on students' academic achievement than the conventional teaching approach.

Discussion-Conclusion
This study aimed to examine the effectiveness of a didactic intervention, developed by utilizing the elements and principles of the BBL strategy, on secondary students' academic performance on the subject of Biology.
Our results revealed that students exposed to an instructional approach for the Biology subject unit "intake of Substances and Digestion," based on BBL elements, displayed a statistically significantly better academic performance than those exposed to a conventional teaching approach. The above findings confirm previous studies concerning selected units in Biology (Aydin & Yel, 2011;Varghese & Pandya, 2016;Vyas & Vashishtha, 2013) which demonstrated a significant improvement in students' academic performance that were instructed with a BBL teaching approach.
It must be stressed that carrying out the so-called conventional teaching approach, teaching materials along with various learning activities and learning techniques, was also used to support information intake and its further process and comprehension. This can be ascertained by the relative increase in the student post-test achievement test of the control group. However, the better effect of the BBL teaching approach might be attributed to various reasons.
BBL counts as a holistic student-centered teaching approach that the course design and the variety of learning activities and stimuli ensure students' pluralistic involvement with the learning material. Consequently, although they do not seem to directly affect the learning action and situation, important learning factors are underpinned, playing a crucial role by implicitly affecting the participation of various brain regions through memories distribution and neurons circuit training (Dubinsky et al., 2013). The brain learns better, when there is a relative time span of relaxation available for being able to process and introspect upon the new information, promoting, thus, new information to an optimum state of consolidation. In the present study, the intercession of the downtime stage aimed to support students' emotional rejuvenation and assist them in retaining their relaxed alertness, ensuring an optimum level of mental and psychological state, through the creation of a learning environment with a low feeling of stress (Caine & Caine, 1994).
The human brain is gifted with the inner curiosity for seeking answers about how the world around it works, continually attempting to make sense of the sensory inputs it receives, to identify contradictions and to make predictions and nourish anticipations (Dubinsky et al., 2013). Accordingly, a condition of great importance to the learning process, is the constantly active student interest, which can be motivated by using appropriate stimuli to deploy students' intrinsic curiosity and to involve them with explorative activities. Previous studies indicate the significant effect of BBL teaching approach on students' motivation and attitude enhancement towards natural science courses (Saleh, 2012;Uzezi & Jonah, 2017) and more specifically, towards Biology courses concerning heredity and cell division (Akyurek & Afacan, 2013). This fact could indirectly account for the students' academic performance improvement when they were exposed to the BBL teaching approach.
Another noteworthy finding, revealed by the present research, concerns the positive effect of the BBL teaching approach on students' new knowledge retention in comparison to the conventional approach. The aforementioned, can be suggested by the statistically higher performance of the experimental group of students in the post-test, which simultaneously worked as a knowledge retention test and was administered in a relatively long time span of two and half months after the completion of the teaching intervention phase. Similar findings have been reported in previous studies where students that received a BBL teaching approach, had a better retention of new knowledge, as it was ascertained by their better performance on retention knowledge posttests, given 1 month after the end of the experimental phase (Tafti & Kadkhodaie, 2017;Uzezi & Jonah, 2017).
Activation of students' prior knowledge, which is retained in the loops of brain cells connections, can boost the retention of new knowledge (Willis, 2007). This can be achieved by associating and connecting new information with older experiences and learning, thus, giving an individual character to new information and leading to its personalization. In parallel, the structure of stronger mnemonic circuits is supported with the further activation of various brain regions that help memory formation (Tileston, 2011). Given the opportunity to recall information from the long-term memory to the working memory, a student has the chance to learn it again (Owens & Tanner, 2017;Roediger & Butler, 2011). Instructional planning and learning environment configuration based on the BBL approach conform with natural capacity of the brain and physiology that it is designed to learn, leading thus to an enhancement of its capability capitalization (Caine & Caine, 1994;Jensen, 2008;Sousa, 2017).
The relative low score (16.19) of the experimental group in relation to the maximum score (32) that could be achieved by the students in their post-test achievement might be explained by the restricted instruction of the Biology subject to one class session per week. Another reason could be the two-and -a-half-month timespan that intervened between the end of the teaching interventions and post-test administration.
Conclusively, teachers use a great number of didactic tools and learning techniques that have emerged from contemporary educational research, in an attempt to achieve better learning outcomes, even in the context of traditional or conventional teaching approaches. However, the present study indicates that it is of pivotal significance for a lesson to be planned and structured in a manner that each learning activity and instructional technique is included in discrete and ordered stages that harmonizes with brain natural rates. The above condition subserves and enables, as much as possible, all the functions of the brain that are involved in the learning process.
On the other hand, it should be stressed that the planning and organization of BBL lessons by a teacher on a daily basis constitutes a quite hard and time-consuming procedure. Students' differences in time response when performing various learning tasks and activities are very important to be taken into consideration for achieving an effective implementation of the different BBL instructional phases of a learning episode. Also, during the brief break of relaxation at the beginning of the down time zone a careful handling is needed by the teacher to avoid an undue noisy atmosphere and a potential general disorder.
The positive effects of the teaching approach based on the BBL principles were confirmed in this study for a restricted sample of seventh-grade students, concerning only the biology unit "Intake of Substances and Digestion." Further studies could investigate the effectiveness of the aforementioned teaching approach in a broader range of biology topics which also include complex and difficult biological concepts, as well as in other grades of secondary education.

Funding
This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.