This study based on cognitive and social semiotic theories investigates whether the influence of specific features of instructional representation from adolescent textbook images could last until adulthood in certain cultures. Two cultural groups, Indonesian (n = 61) and Taiwanese (n = 60) college students, were recruited from a public Taiwanese…

Evolution is a fundamental part of biology and thus it is essential that biology preservice teachers understand and accept it. The relationship between knowledge and acceptance of evolution, and specifically human evolution, has not been fully investigated in Israel. We sought to learn about that relationship amongst Israeli Jewish religious…

Despite the importance of emotions in science education, research?on affect remains sparse. A promising direction is to explore the role of immersive visualisation in evoking affective responses. We investigate whether touch-based zooming interaction with a tabletop visualisation of the tree of life evokes various affective responses,…

Research has previously examined the role of the epistemological background of students in accepting or rejecting the theory of evolution. In this study, the participants were 11 undergraduate biology major students in a private university in Beirut, Lebanon. We collected data through semi-structured interviews, and we extracted the patterns…

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…

This study investigates how Grade 12 secondary school students in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) perceive and respond to teaching and learning on evolution. A mixed-methodology approach including a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews was used. The study shows that Saudi students are aware of the great significance that has been…

Learning about evolution is a foundational part of biology education, but most current studies that explore college student evolution education are conducted at universities. However, community college students tend to be more diverse in characteristics shown to be related to evolution education outcomes. To explore how studies involving…

The purpose of the present study was to reveal the effectiveness of the Nature of Science (NOS) embedded in Argument-Driven Inquiry (ADI) instructional method on pre-service science teachers' (PSTs) content knowledge and self-efficacy in evolution theory. The study was a mixed-method study in which the qualitative data collection and analysis was…

Evolution is central to biology education and yet, it is often one of the most misunderstood and controversial topics that biology educators must teach. Research spanning the last four decades has shown that students continue to struggle, even with direct instruction, to understand the process of evolution by natural selection. In my first…

Over the past decades, a large body of research has examined students' magnitudes of evolution acceptance and related measurement issues resulting in questions concerning instruments' validity and operationalization. Until now, several studies investigated validity aspects of often-used evolution acceptance instruments and came to diverging…

Learning about evolution can be challenging for students, as a full understanding may require them to see the world in new ways, to master a disciplinary language and to understand complex processes. Drawing on a long line of theoretically grounded arguments of philosophers and researchers for including wonder in science teaching, we report on the…

Teaching human evolution should be initialized by understanding the learners' perspective to yield fruitful results. This study was conducted to aid in achieving that objective and provide ways for educators to develop strategies that learners can perceive and appreciate, particularly those who are not inclined toward science. This study also…

This study researches relationships between 12th-grade students' epistemological beliefs towards science and their conceptual understanding of evolution by natural selection. Forty-two 12th-grade students in a suburban high school in Cyprus, who participated in a biology course, completed measures of their: (1) epistemological beliefs towards…

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.…

There already exists a large knowledge base about teaching and learning related to the origins, diversity and history of life on Earth. We know less about teaching and learning related to wider issues pertinent to both religion and science. In our research with 40 students in six secondary schools in England, we looked at wider issues of student…