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In his magnum opus, Natural History: General and Particular, Count Buffon, one of the leading natural historians of the 18th century, argued that all life in the New World, particularly North America, was degener...
Many topics in evolutionary biology have been the focus of little research about student thinking and learning. This lack of research limits the evidence base on which instructors can draw to inform their teac...
To realize the promise of the Next Generation Science Standards, educators require new three-dimensional, phenomenon-based curriculum materials. We describe and report on pilot test results from such a resource—E...
Evolution is a central, unifying theory for all of life science, yet the subject is poorly represented in most secondary-school biology courses, especially in the United States. One challenge to learning evolu...
Diagrammatic depictions of evolutionary relationships play an increasingly important role in scientific and educational literature. Reading evolutionary trees is seen as a major challenge for biologists in lea...
Charles Darwin viewed eyes as the epitome of evolution by natural selection, describing them as organs of extreme perfection and complication. The visual system is therefore fertile ground for teaching fundame...
Macroevolutionary time is a difficult idea to grasp and is considered to be a threshold concept in teaching and learning evolution. One way of addressing this subject is to use animations that represent evolut...
Misunderstandings of the nature of science (NOS) contribute greatly to resistance to evolutionary theory especially among non-scientific audiences. Here we delineate three extended instructional examples that ...
Over the past 25 years a number of instruments have been published that attempt to measure understanding and acceptance of evolution. Science educators have been administering these instruments and reporting r...
Despite widespread concern about the differential measurement of evolution acceptance among researchers, no one has systematically explored how instrument choice can impact research results and conclusions in ...
The religious or cultural objections by many people to the teaching of evolution in high school biology classrooms can impact both students’ willingness to explore a scientific understanding of evolutionary th...
Understanding evolution is critical to learning biology, but few college instructors take advantage of the body of peer-reviewed literature that can inform evolution teaching and assessment. Here we summarize ...
Evolution education research has focused on biology populations, while other disciplines organized around evolutionary theory—such as biological anthropology—remain understudied. Cognitive science and educatio...
The evolution education research community has defined the construct of “evolution acceptance” in different ways and measured it using different instruments. One of these instruments—the GAENE—has not been ana...
Current direct Likert measures for evolution acceptance include the MATE, GAENE, and I-SEA. Pros and cons of each of these instruments have been debated, and yet there is a dearth of research teasing out their...
For the last 59 years a team of Russian geneticists led by Lyudmila Trut have been running one of the most important biology experiments of the 20th, and now 21st, century. The experiment was the brainchild of...
Students’ knowledge of scientific principles of evolution is often inadequate, despite its recognized importance for understanding biology. Moreover, difficulties associated with underlying abstract concepts s...
In this article, I provide an analysis of my work (1985–present) with non-major biology students and science teacher candidates in developing strategies for teaching and enhancing learning with respect to evol...
This is a review of Ryan’s A Taste for the Beautiful and Prum’s The Evolution of Beauty, two books that show how sexual selection by female choice can favor the evolution of beauty.
Previous research has identified numerous factors to explain why students have difficulty learning about evolution. Some of these factors include a student’s background (including their religion and major of s...
For the past 32 years, we have polled first-year biology students annually at the University of New South Wales concerning their views about evolution and creationism. The purposes of the research were to iden...
Despite the overwhelming agreement among scientists regarding the fundamental importance of evolution to all areas of biology, a lack of evolution understanding and acceptance has been reported in studies of s...
The Galápagos archipelago is known worldwide for its contributions to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, and the islands continue to support studies in evolutionary biology. Yet despite...
Research in evolutionary biology has been progressively influenced by big data such as massive genome and transcriptome sequencing data, scalar measurements of several phenotypes on tens to thousands of indivi...
Acceptance and understanding of evolutionary ideas remains low in the United States despite renewed science education standards, nearly unanimous acceptance among scientists, and decades of research on the tea...
Concept inventories (CIs) are commonly used tools for assessing student understanding of scientific and naive ideas, yet the body of empirical evidence supporting the inferences drawn from CI scores is often l...
A review of L. Spinney. 2017
This research builds on a previous study that looked at the effectiveness of a simulation-based module for teaching students about the process of evolution by natural selection. While the previous study showed...
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...
Acceptance of evolutionary theory varies widely and is often associated with religious background. Some have suggested there exists an additional relationship between scientific reasoning ability and the accep...
Evolution education, in both schools and informal education, often focuses on natural selection and the fit of organisms through natural selection to their environment and way of life. Examples of evidence tha...
Evolution and its mechanisms of action are concepts that unite all aspects of biology, but remain some of the most difficult for students to understand. To address this challenge, we designed a hands-on activi...
Charles Darwin’s birthday, February 12th, is an international celebration coined Darwin Day. During the week of his birthday, universities, museums, and science-oriented organizations worldwide host events tha...
Evolution is everywhere in Galápagos, especially regarding the role the islands have played in the history of evolutionary thought. In turn, the Galápagos National Park guides are in a unique position as infor...
Evolutionary thinking is traditionally directly related to education and inversely to religiosity. Accordingly, biology students are naturally expected to be more prone to naturalist evolution due to their clo...
How acceptance of evolution relates to understanding of evolution remains controversial despite decades of research. It even remains unclear whether cultural/attitudinal factors or cognitive factors have a gre...
The original article was published in Evolution: Education and Outreach 2017 10:5
The focus of this study is a state-by-state comparison of middle school science standards on evolution in the United States. In 2009, Louise Mead and Anton Mates reviewed the high school science standards on e...
The Erratum to this article has been published in Evolution: Education and Outreach 2017 10:6
A Erratum has been published.
Despite decades of education reform efforts, the percent of the general US population accepting biological evolution as the explanation for the diversity of life has remained relatively unchanged over the past...
Simulations can be an active and engaging way for students to learn about natural selection, and many have been developed, including both physical and virtual simulations. In this study we assessed the student...
Preparing students to explore, understand, and resolve societal challenges such as global climate change is an important task for evolutionary and ecological biologists that will require novel and innovative p...
Molecular clocks based upon amino acid sequences in proteins have played a major role in the clarification of evolutionary phylogenies. Creationist criticisms of these methods sometimes rely upon data that mi...
Mukherjee, S. The Gene: An intimate history.Scribner, NY.594 pages; ISBN: 978-1-4767-330-0; Price: $20.00.
Mammals constitute a rich subject of study on evolution and development and provide model organisms for experimental investigations. They can serve to illustrate how ontogeny and phylogeny can be studied toget...
Research has shown that students have a variety of ideas about natural selection that may be context dependent. Prior analyses of student responses to open-ended evolution items have demonstrated that students...
We present an inquiry-based curriculum based on the digital evolution platform Avida-ED (http://avida-ed.msu.edu). We designed an instructional sequence and ...
Evolution is a difficult subject for students, with well-documented confusion about natural selection, tree thinking, and genetic drift among other topics. Here we investigate the effect of a simulation-based ...
The work is part of a wider research project wherein we are trying to further explore the conceptual ecology of evolutionary theory of present and prospective teachers in Greece.
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