Graduate-level reading groups serve as a primary forum for students to learn current and complex concepts in their field. Because graduate students lament that reading "abnormally long" articles discourage them from attending particular reading group sessions, we tested the hypothesis that attendance will decrease proportionally with…

Writing in 1962, Phillippe Aries argued that an initial step in the movement to establish schools for children in Europe took place during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when moralists and artists began portraying children as different from adults. According to Aries, the portrayal of childhood as a unique period enabled the family and…

Following evolutionary theory and an agriculture model, ecosystem research has stressed bottom-up dynamics, implying that top wild predators are epiphenomenal effects of more basic causes. As such, they are assumed expendable. A more modern co-evolutionary and wilderness approach--trophic cascades--instead suggests that top predators, whose…

Analogies play significant roles in communication as well as in problem solving and model building in science domains. Analogies have also been incorporated into several different instructional strategies--most notably in science domains where the concepts and principles to be learned are abstract or complex. Although several instructional models…

This article proposes an evolutionary model of risky behavior in adolescence and contrasts it with the prevailing developmental psychopathology model. The evolutionary model contends that understanding the evolutionary functions of adolescence is critical to explaining why adolescents engage in risky behavior and that successful intervention…

In this study, we explored the factors related to acceptance of evolutionary theory among students/preservice preschool education teachers using conceptual ecology for biological evolution as a theoretical frame. We aimed to examine the acceptance and understanding of evolutionary theory and also the relationship of acceptance and understanding of…

The stronghold that games have on our society has made it imperative that educators understand the impact that video games can have. Owens (2012) presented two frames for how the press discussed the popular game "Spore," which incorporates elements of science topics. One frame suggested that the game teaches children about intelligent design,…

Cooling identifies two starting-points from which to approach the question of the place of religion in education. He calls them "the Argument from Fairness" and "the Argument from Objectivity". He attributes both of them to humanists and to me personally. He says that he accepts the Argument from Fairness, but rejects the Argument from…

While many states are handling evolution better today than in the past, anti-evolution pressures continue to threaten state science standards. In April 2012, for example, Tennessee passed a law that enables teachers to bring anti-evolution materials into the classroom without being challenged by administrators. This law is similar to the Science…

Central nervous networks, be they a part of the human brain or a group of neurons in a snail, may be designed to produce distinct patterns of movement. Central pattern generators can account for the development and production of normal vocal signals without auditory feedback in non-songbirds. Songbirds need auditory feedback to develop and…

Evolutionary creation offers a conservative Christian approach to evolution. It explores biblical faith and evolutionary science through a Two Divine Books model and proposes a complementary relationship between Scripture and science. The Book of God's Words discloses the spiritual character of the world, while the Book of God's Works reveals the…

Ghassib (2010) presents a provocative view of science as industry. He ties science specifically to a "productivist" industrial model and to knowledge production. If judged based on what is explicit in this article, his theory is useful and logical. There are, however, several concerns as well. Some of these are implied by the title of his article,…

In this inquiry-based activity, students catalog external and internal characteristics of four different classes of animals during dissection exercises. On the basis of their accumulated data, students compare and contrast the animals, devise a phylogenetic tree, and provide reasonable characteristics for extinct transitional organisms. (Contains…

Biology instructors from middle school to university level recognize that natural selection is an essential topic in the curriculum. Numerous studies have shown the prevalence of many alternative conceptions about evolution that persist despite instruction in student populations all over the world. Having valid, reliable and easily used…

This article locates consumer behavior analysis within the modern neo-Darwinian synthesis, seeking to establish an interface between the ultimate-level theorizing of human evolutionary psychology and the proximate level of inquiry typically favored by operant learning theorists. Following an initial overview of the central tenets of neo-Darwinism,…