Fig. 1

a Percentages of students who agreed with a creationist-leaning statements, and b scientific statements regarding the origin and diversity of life on earth. Questions are from the Material Acceptance of the Theory of Evolution (MATE) instrument (Rutledge and Sadler 2007). Students are divided into categories depending on whether they report having evolution only (N = 460), creationism alone or with evolution (N = 162), or neither evolution nor creationism (N = 96) in high school biology. All differences statistically significant (p < 0.05) with contingency-table analysis, using Pearson’s chi-square test. In addition, paired comparisons reveal statistically significant per-item differences in mean response between evolution and creationism (Student’s t-test, p < 0.01 for each item)