Intuitive conceptions based on cognitive biases (teleology, anthropomorphism, and essentialism) often prove helpful in everyday life while simultaneously being problematic in scientific contexts. Nonetheless, students often have intuitive conceptions of scientific topics such as evolution. As potential approaches to enable students to…

Cognitive load theory provides instructional recommendations based on our knowledge of human cognition. Evolutionary psychology is used to assume that knowledge should be divided into biologically primary information that we have specifically evolved to acquire and biologically secondary information that we have not specifically evolved to…

Research reproducibility is essential for scientific development. Yet, rates of reproducibility are low. As increasingly more research relies on computers and software, efforts for improving reproducibility rates have focused on making research products digitally available, such as publishing analysis workflows as computer code, and raw and…

The purpose of this study was to investigate bridging inferences and learning when students with low topic knowledge read multiple complementary biology texts. Using a think-aloud protocol, we assessed students' (n = 74) cognitive processes while they read one text about principles of natural selection and three texts about examples of natural…

Prior studies have shown that students have difficulty understanding the role of mutation in evolution and genetics. However, little is known about unifying themes underlying students' difficulty with mutation. In this study, we examined students' written explanations about mutation from a cognitive science perspective. According to one cognitive…

Although historical changes in scientific ideas sometimes display striking similarities with students' conceptual progressions, some scholars have cautioned that such similarities lack meaningful commonalities. In the history of evolution, while Darwin and his contemporaries often used natural selection to explain evolutionary trait gain or…

The biological community is currently undertaking one its greatest scientific endeavours, that of constructing the Tree of Life, a phylogeny intended to be an evidenced-based, predictive road map of evolutionary relationships among Earth's biota. Unfortunately, we know very little about how such diagrams are understood, interpreted, or used…

With applications of Tree of Life data becoming ever more prevalent in everyday contexts, tree thinking has emerged as a vital component of scientific literacy. This article reports a study testing the hypothesis that instruction in natural selection, which is the primary focus of US evolution education at the high school and introductory college…

Bowers and Davis (2012) criticize Bayesian modelers for telling "just so" stories about cognition and neuroscience. Their criticisms are weakened by not giving an accurate characterization of the motivation behind Bayesian modeling or the ways in which Bayesian models are used and by not evaluating this theoretical framework against specific…

This paper discusses the relationship between religion and science education in the light of the cognitive sciences. We challenge the popular view that science and religion are compatible, a view that suggests that learning and understanding evolutionary theory has no effect on students' religious beliefs and vice versa. We develop a cognitive…

Cognitive load theory has been concerned primarily with techniques that will facilitate the acquisition by students of knowledge previously generated by others and deemed to be important by society. The initial generation of that knowledge, a creative process, has been largely ignored. The recent expansion of cognitive load theory's cognitive…

Since language is a biological trait, it is necessary to investigate its evolution, development, and functions, along with the mechanisms that have been set aside, and are now recruited, for its acquisition and use. It is argued here that progress toward each of these goals can be facilitated by new programs of research, carried out within a new…

This mixed-methods study examined the interactions and learning outcomes of science teachers in an online graduate-level course on evolutionary biology intended to improve their content knowledge and science lesson planning. Discussion posts made by the teachers in this seven-week course were analyzed for cognitive presence using the Community of…

This article talks about disciplinary fudging. The author points out that one fudges for complex and comprehensible reasons. However, she wonders at what point one becomes enough of an insider in a discipline to know how to gloss over the nuances of a complicated, inconvenient, or controversial topic.

Semistructured interviews with 15 masters-level biology students revealed that most proposed deterministic explanations of evolutionary processes, ignored the role of chance, seemed unaware of debates over deterministic versus probabilistic models of evolution, and confused evolutionary theory (a model) with the actual complex processes it…