After accepting the editor's invitation to write a response to Richard Machalek and Michael W. Martin's "Evolution, Biology, and Society: A Conversation for the 21st-Century Sociology Classroom," the author took up their recommendation to learn more about recent work on biology and social behavior. She considered seriously Machalek and Martin's…

The development of rich, reliable, and robust measures of the composition, structure, and stability of student thinking about core scientific ideas (such as natural selection) remains a complex challenge facing science educators. In their recent article (Nehm & Schonfeld 2008), the authors explored the strengths, weaknesses, and insights provided…

Technology contributes to the growth of human knowledge in five distinct, though overlapping, ways: (1) all technologies are material embodiments and thus more or less durable records of ideas that have survived some test with external reality; (2) telescopes, microscopes, and similar technologies extend external experience and knowledge to areas…