ABSTRACT
This chapter is divided into two sections. The first part provides a description of the high school biology curricula taught in the 20th century and presents the factors that, in the author’s opinion, have contributed to the creation of these different study programs, based on the rationale described by Tyler (1966). The development of high school biology curricula during the past century will be depicted on the basis of two assumptions: one, that there is a high correlation among biology research, biology content structure, and biology high school curricula; and two, that new high school curricula in biology were affected by changes in society’s daily life, in the high school student populations, research in science education in biology, and learning theories and pedagogy. All of these changes required modifications in the education of preservice and inservice biology teachers; the latter issue is beyond the scope of this chapter. This section includes a short report based on selected studies of formative and summative evaluations, which investigated the implementation of the new programs in teaching biology in high school.
