Acceptance of evolution

Background: While recent research indicates that using human examples can be an engaging way to teach core evolutionary concepts such as natural selection and phylogenetic thinking, teachers still face potential conflicts and challenges that arise from cultural barriers to teaching and learning about evolution. The "Teaching Evolution through Human Examples" (TEtHE) project developed (1) a set of four curriculum mini-units for advanced placement (A.P.) biology that use human examples to teach evolutionary principles (Adaptation to Altitude, Evolution of Human Skin Color, Malaria, and What Does It Mean To Be Human?), and (2) a cultural and religious sensitivity (CRS) teaching strategies resource that includes background materials and two in-class activities to help teachers create a classroom environment to increase student willingness to engage the topic. Methods: This paper reports on the development and field test of the TEtHE materials in A.P. biology classes in 10 schools in 8 states during the 2012-2013 school year using a design-based research framework (cf. Anderson and Shattuck in Educ Res 41:16-25, 2012). We chose A.P. classrooms to study the potential impacts of the materials in a "best case scenario" and analyzed data about understanding and acceptance of evolution from pre-post assessments in the 10 classrooms separately to mitigate potential validity concerns arising from the design (Anderson and Shat-tuck in Educ Res 41:16-25, 2012; Shadish et al. in Experimental and quasi-experimental designs for generalized causal inference. Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 2002). These data were treated as a secondary source of formative data to add additional perspective to teacher self-reports, observations, student and teacher questionnaires, teacher interviews, and student focus groups. Results: Results indicate that the use of the three curriculum mini-units which focus on natural selection and the CRS classroom activities generally increased A.P. biology students' understanding and acceptance of evolution. Students whose teachers used one of the CRS activities showed generally larger increases in understanding of evolution than those whose teachers did not use one of the CRS activities. Conclusions: Although the utility of using human examples to teach evolution in college-level classes has been demonstrated in a few previous studies, this is the first national project of which we are aware to systematically explore the effect of a similar approach in high school biology classes. While we recognize that the results may be mitigated by the limitations of design-based research, particularly the absence of a comparison or control group, the general effectiveness of this approach suggested by qualitative and quantitative data in increasing student understanding and acceptance of evolution suggests that using human examples and explicitly creating a classroom environment to help students engage the topic of evolution are worth considering for further development and more robust testing.

Background: Although a large body of work in science education has established the pervasive problem of science teachers' alternative conceptions about evolution, knowledge deficits, and anti-evolutionary attitudes, only a handful of interventions have explored the mitigation of these issues using professional development (PD) workshops, and not a single study to our knowledge has investigated if positive outcomes are sustained long after program completion. The central aim of our study was to investigate the long-term consequences of an intensive, short-term professional development program on teachers' knowledge of evolution, acceptance of evolution, and knowledge of the nature of science (NOS). Methods: Program efficacy was examined using a pre-post, delayed post-test design linked to quantitative measures of teacher knowledge, performance (explanatory competence), and acceptance using published instruments shown to generate reliable and valid inferences. Results: Our study is the first to report sustained large effect sizes for both knowledge of evolution, NOS, and acceptance change ~1.5 years after program completion. Concordant with other measures, teacher self-reports indicated that the PD program had lasting effects. Conclusions: Our study suggests that short-term PD built using specific research-based principles can have lasting impacts on teachers' evolutionary knowledge and acceptance. Because evidence of sustained knowledge and belief change is prerequisite to downstream classroom studies (e.g., impacts on student learning), retention of evolutionary knowledge improvements and acceptance change emerge as central, but previously unstudied, components of teacher evolution PD.

The purpose of this study was to explore science content used during college students’ negotiation of biology-based socioscientific issues (SSI) and examine how it related to students’ conceptual understanding and acceptance of biological evolution. The Socioscientific Issues Questionnaire (SSI-Q) was developed to measure depth of evolutionary science content use during SSI negotiation. Fifty-two upper level undergraduate biology and non-biology majors completed the SSI-Q and also the Conceptual Inventory of Natural Selection to assess evolution understanding and the Measure of Acceptance of the Theory of Evolution to appraise evolution acceptance. A multiple regression analysis tested for interaction effects between the predictor variables, evolution understanding and evolution acceptance. Results indicate that college students primarily use science concepts related to evolution to negotiate biology-based SSI
including variation in a population, inheritance of traits, differential success, and change through time.
The hypothesis that the extent of one’s acceptance of evolution is a mitigating factor in how science content related to evolution is evoked during SSI negotiation was supported by the data, in that such content was consistently evoked by participants for each of the three SSI scenarios used in this study.

Questions about our origin as a species are universal and compelling. Evolution-and in particular human evolution is a subject that generates intense interest across the world, evidenced by the fact that fossil and DNA discoveries grace the covers of major science journals and magazines as well as other popular print and online media. However, virtually all national polls indicate that the majority of Americans strongly reject biological evolution as a fact-based, well-tested, and robust understanding of the history of life. In the popular mind, no topic in all of science is more contentious or polarizing than evolution and media sources often only serve to magnify this polarization by covering challenges to the teaching of evolution. In the realm of teaching, debates about evolution have shaped textbooks , curricula, standards, and policy. Challenges to accepting and understanding evolution include mistrust and denial of science, cognitive obstacles and misconceptions, language and terminology, and a religious worldview, among others. Teachers, who are on the front lines of these challenges, must be armed with the tools and techniques to teach evolution in formal education settings across grades K-16 in a straightforward, thorough, and sensitive way. Despite the potentially controversial topic of human evolution, growing research is demonstrating that a peda-gogical focus on human examples is an effective and engaging way to teach core concepts of evolutionary biology.

In this study, using multiple regression analysis, we aimed to explore the factors related to
acceptance of evolutionary theory among preservice Turkish biology teachers using conceptual ecology for
biological evolution as a theoretical lens.We aimed to determine the extent to which we can account for the
variance in acceptance of evolutionary theory by using understanding of evolutionary theory,
epistemological beliefs, thinking dispositions, and parents’ educational level as independent variables.
Preservice biology teachers’ thinking dispositions, their understanding of evolutionary theory, and their
parents’ educational level are positively correlated with acceptance of evolutionary theory. We did not find
any significant positive correlation between epistemological beliefs and acceptance of evolution because of
low reliability coefficients of subscales of the epistemological beliefs instrument. Together they explained
10.5% of the variance. These results suggest that studying the relationship between acceptance of
evolutionary theory and other related factors in a multivariate context is more informative than examining
the relationship between acceptance of evolutionary theory and other factors in isolation. Our findings
indicate that studying a controversial issue such as acceptance of evolutionary theory in a multivariate
fashion, using conceptual ecology as a theoretical lens to interpret the findings, is informative. Our results
suggest the inclusion of thinking dispositions in conceptual ecology for biological evolution.

Abstract


Background

Public acceptance and understanding of evolution is among the most investigated themes within studies of science and society. In the past decades, scientists and educators have explored acceptance and understanding of the Darwinian theories across a variety of publics, in order to identify possible causal explanations and barriers that make evolution so difficult to be grasped. Indeed, there are both socio-cultural and intuitive reasoning factors which have been widely investigated especially in the USA, a country that shows a widespread resistance. More recently data for Europe, Africa and the Middle East have been published, showing significant differences explained mainly by socio-cultural, religious and political factors. In this respect, the Italian society is still under-investigated. This paper presents and discusses the outcomes of a public survey performed during a Darwin Day celebration in Rome (Italy, February 2013).

Methods

A written questionnaire was submitted to all the participants with the aim of testing attitudes and level of knowledge about evolution among an interested and informed public (N = 124).

Results

The results show that acceptance of evolution is not an issue in such a selected sector of the lay public, although difficulties emerge in the comprehension of some basic principles.

Conclusions

Overall, younger people perform better than respondents older than 65 years, reflecting how science education in Italy has progressed in the latest decades.

Background: While recent research indicates that using human examples can be an engaging way to teach core evolutionary concepts such as natural selection and phylogenetic thinking, teachers still face potential conflicts and challenges that arise from cultural barriers to teaching and learning about evolution. The " Teaching Evolution through Human Examples " (TEtHE) project developed (1) a set of four curriculum mini-units for advanced placement (A.P.) biology that use human examples to teach evolutionary principles (Adaptation to Altitude, Evolution of Human Skin Color, Malaria, and What Does It Mean To Be Human?), and (2) a cultural and religious sensitivity (CRS) teaching strategies resource that includes background materials and two in-class activities to help teachers create a classroom environment to increase student willingness to engage the topic. Methods: This paper reports on the development and field test of the TEtHE materials in A.P. biology classes in 10 sc...

We aimed to examine the acceptance of evolution and its relationship with religiosity among Greek biology university students and whether the attendance of an evolutionary biology course could affect the acceptance of evolution. In Greece the teaching of evolution has been downgraded from secondary education for years and Greeks exhibit a strong religiosity. Biology university students are those that will later, after their graduation, may become biology teachers in Greek secondary education. Our sample consisted of 603 Greek biology majors students. We conducted quantitative research and our research tool was developed using the MATE scale for exploring the acceptance of evolution and the CRS scale along with five more questions to investigate the level of religiosity. Results indicate that Greek biology students have a high acceptance of evolution, higher than the ones recorded in the USA and Turkey. Among them women scored less than men in the MATE scale and both are characterised as not very religious. Religiosity is negatively correlated, although not so much, with the acceptance of evolution and can predict almost ¼ of the variance in acceptance. The attendance of an evolutionary biology course seemed to be a factor that significantly affects the acceptance of evolution.