This study analyzes the effect of different instructions on threshold concepts within material covering natural selection on students' use of concepts about evolution. Moreover, it examines students' use of concepts as interconnected networks when reasoning about natural selection and analyzes how these concepts relate to each other regarding…

Evolution understanding is often positively connected with magnitudes of evolution acceptance, whereas religiosity mostly interferes negatively. However, comparisons between studies and countries must be treated cautiously due to the diversity of used instruments and samples. This study aims to generate new evidence concerning the interplay of…

Both evolution and climate change have broad scientific consensus, and yet they are the most contested scientific concepts in the US K-12 education system. This study aimed to explore trends in proposed US state legislation employed from 2003 to 2023 by anti-evolution and anti-climate change education movements to constrain the teaching of these…

Addressing student conceptions is crucial in science education. Therefore, teachers should be able to notice and interpret situations, in which student conceptions are part of the complex classroom interactions. This study analyzes the skills known as professional vision using an interpretivist research paradigm and a sociocultural perspective.…

Although visual aids are widely considered a valuable source of scaffolding, the nature and active utilization of these aids in current science classrooms are not well understood. This qualitative study explores interaction in the teaching of concepts related to evolution, with a specific focus on a teacher's use of different visual support…

The use of scientific modeling has been shown to be highly effective in the learning of science content in multiple disciplines for non-English Learners (EL). However, the benefits of using this pedagogy with ELs have not been heavily explored. This article discusses the use of modeling-based evolution and population ecology pedagogical units in a…

Many standards documents and learning progressions recommend evolution learning in elementary grades. Given young children's interest in dinosaurs and other fossils, fossil investigations can provide a rich entry into evolutionary biology for young learners. Educational psychology literature has addressed children's reasoning about foundational…

Research suggests that students tend to explain the origin of biological traits in terms of needs or purposes and/or as the direct product of genes, rather than as the outcome of evolutionary and developmental processes. We suggest that in order for students to be able to construct scientific explanations, it is important to clearly and explicitly…

We present the case of Michael, a prospective high school biology teacher, to explore the implications of teacher resistance and avoidance to the topic of evolution. This case is drawn from a year-long qualitative research study that examined Michael's process of learning to teach high school biology and describes how his avoidance of evolution in…

Teaching and learning about complex scientific content, such as biological evolution, is challenging in part because students have a difficult time seeing the relevance of evolution in their everyday lives. The purpose of this study was to explore the effectiveness of the Teaching for Transformative Experiences in Science (TTES) model (Pugh, 2002)…

This critical analysis examined research on evolution in the United States between the years 2000-2014, spanning early classroom implementation of the National Science Education Standards to current research findings. First, we sought to understand how the research literature published between 2000 and 2014 contributed to knowledge of evolution…

Although the core work of science is oriented toward constructing, revising, applying, and defending models of the natural world, models appear only rarely in school science, and usually only as illustrations, rather than theory building tools. We describe the rationale and structure for a learning progression to understand the development of…

This article draws on M. M. Bakhtin's (1981) notion of dialogism to articulate what it means to understand a scientific idea. In science, understanding an idea is both conceptual and epistemic and is exhibited by an ability to use it in explanation and argumentation. Some distillation of these activities implies that dialogic understanding of a…

Teaching the theory of evolution in classrooms takes place in a social, intellectual, and pedagogical context which must be considered with care if students are to receive a complete and authentic education. In addition to the science education literature on this topic, attention is directed to the expanding literature on science and religion, as…

Examines how college-educated adults (n=135) from diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds perceive the impact of evolutionary theory on individuals and society. Identifies a continuum of perspectives ranging from strong creationist to strong evolutionist. Reports differences between evolutionists and creationists in their prior exposure to…