Even though it is widely held that the theory of evolution is one of the pillars of the biological sciences, as we begin the third decade of the twenty-first century, it is alarming how little we know about science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors and non-STEM majors' misconceptions about evolution in countries such as…

In the 2020/21 school year, education changed overnight due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The aim of this study was to explore the impact of the lockdown on students' knowledge of evolution. Two student groups were compared; both covered the same subject matter, and only the implementation differed: either online or in class. The sample consisted of…

There is an emphasis on survival-based selection in biology education that can allow students to neglect other important evolutionary components, such as sexual selection, reproduction, and inheritance. Student understanding of the role of reproduction in evolution is as important as student understanding of the role of survival. Limiting…

This study examines what prior knowledge and misconceptions about evolutionary theory students bring with them into an introductory biological anthropology course. One hundred and fifty-three students completed short, anonymous surveys about evolution on the first day of class before any content was discussed. Of a possible seven points, the…

Natural selection is a fundamental scientific process, yet students and educators alike demonstrate misconceptions of the process. Though images are used often in science to facilitate learning, it is less common to assess learners' understanding through their own drawings. This study utilizes a multiple-choice assessment of evolutionary processes…

We aimed to examine the acceptance of evolution and its relationship with religiosity among Greek biology university students and whether the attendance of an evolutionary biology course could affect the acceptance of evolution. In Greece the teaching of evolution has been downgraded from secondary education for years and Greeks exhibit a strong…

Students' understanding of the concepts that underlie evolution are often less than optimal and make it difficult for them to accept the theory of evolution. The aimed of this study were to: 1) map students' knowledge of Mutation and Recombination (M and R); and 2) analyze the effect of gender on their chairperson. This survey research involving…

Textbooks provide a rich site within which to investigate how members of a scientific discipline choose to represent their research to general audiences. We used critical contextual empiricism as a framework for interrogating how a scientific community is depicted via images in evolution textbook chapters on sexual selection. Textbooks that…

Curricula impart knowledge, instill values, and shape collective memory. Despite growing public funding for religious schools through U.S. school choice programs, little is known about what they teach. We examine textbooks from public schools, religious private schools, and home schools, applying computational methods -- including the use of…

Recent upgrades to cognitive load theory suggest that evolutionary processes have shaped the way that working memory processes cultural and social information. According to evolutionarily educational psychologists, some forms of information are processed with lower working memory loads than other forms. The former are evolutionarily salient and…

Accurate, rational, and scientific decision making is now considered to be the most important skill in science education. Many studies have found that overconfidence bias is one of the cognitive biases hindering people from achieving such decision making. Gender and country play crucial roles in overconfidence bias. For instance, some particular…

America's rank among the lowest of developed countries in evolution acceptance rates is due, at least in part, to religious and political opposition. The negative correlations among religiosity, political ideology, and evolution acceptance in the United States have been documented repeatedly, and comfort with evolution varies by region with…

Student interest in plants is lacking. Therefore, we investigated potential drivers of situational interest in cultivated plants and interactions between different dimensions of interest, i.e. topic, context and learning activity. A total of 462 high school students (14-17 years of age) rated two sets of questionnaire items combining eight plants…

Objective: Ideas from evolutionary theories are increasingly taken up in health promotion. This article seeks to demonstrate how such a trend has the potential to embed essentialist and limiting stereotypes of women and men in health promotion practice. Design: We draw on material gathered for a larger ethnographic study that examined how…

This retrospective narrative investigation challenges aspects of structural determinism. The biographical data generated in the study revealed that the baby-boomer, male participants were not academically constrained by their working class identities. Interpersonal relationships experienced within an individual's unique communities of practice…