Concept inventories are often used to assess current student understanding although conceptual change models are problematic. Due to controversies with conceptual change models and the realities of student assessment, it is important that concept inventories are evaluated using a variety of theoretical models to improve quality. This study used a…

Psychology texts often cite the work of Marian and Keller Breland and their business, Animal Behavior Enterprises (ABE), to demonstrate operant conditioning and the "misbehavior of organisms" from an evolutionary perspective. Now available on the Internet at the official IQ Zoo website (http://www3.uca.edu/iqzoo/), the artifacts of ABE's work, in…

Natural selection is one of the most important concepts for biology students to understand, but students frequently have misconceptions regarding how natural selection operates. Many of these misconceptions, such as a belief in "Lamarckian" evolution, are based on a misunderstanding of inheritance. In this essay, we argue that evolution…

This article seeks to unify two subfields of psychology that have hitherto stood separately: evolutionary psychology and intelligence research/differential psychology. I suggest that general intelligence may simultaneously be an evolved adaptation and an individual-difference variable. Tooby and Cosmides's (1990a) notion of random quantitative…

In David Long's article, "Scientists at Play in a Field of the Lord," he studies the discourse between a network of regional scientists, atheists, activists and evolutionists at the opening of The Creation Museum on Memorial Day, 2007. This review essay examines the teaching of evolution through the teacher's "lens of empathy" and also considers a…

This article analyzes the topic of leadership from an evolutionary perspective and proposes three conclusions that are not part of mainstream theory. First, leading and following are strategies that evolved for solving social coordination problems in ancestral environments, including in particular the problems of group movement, intragroup…

How did human intelligence evolve to be so high? Lynn [Lynn, R. (1991). The evolution of race differences in intelligence. Mankind Quarterly, 32, 99-173] and Rushton [Rushton, J.P. (1995). Race, evolution, and behavior: A life history perspective. New Brunswick: Transaction] suggest that the main forces behind the evolution of human intelligence…

In this article, the authors examine the use of language in debating evolution, and suggest careful choice of the terms by which people describe both themselves and their opponents. Present-day evolution science is solidly based on fact, and is as far advanced from Charles Darwin's original theory as present-day chemistry is from Dalton's atomic…

James Mark Baldwin is one of the most important and least known early American scientific psychologists. Drawing inspiration from Charles Darwin and other evolutionists of the period, Baldwin developed a biosocial theory of psychological development that influenced both Jean Piaget and Lev S. Vygotsky; and he proposed a mechanism relating learned…

The paper adopts the co-evolutionary perspective on the human society/natural environment relationship developed, particularly, by the economist Richard Norgaard. This implies that human environmental knowledge is necessarily dynamic and incomplete. By extension, it is also fragmentary, in the sense that what may hold true when considering…

The consideration of threshold concepts is offered in the context of biological education as a theoretical framework that may have utility in the teaching and learning of biology at all levels. Threshold concepts may provide a mechanism to explain the observed punctuated nature of conceptual change. This perspective raises the profile of periods…

I explore Darwin and his Theory of Natural Selection from a Social Science perspective and a social studies approach of inquiry into contemporary issues. This approach augments the more common natural science focus on the mechanics of natural selection and evolution in favor of a focus on social issues, controversy, and dialog necessary to support…

The development of rich, reliable, and robust measures of the composition, structure, and stability of student thinking about core scientific ideas (such as natural selection) remains a complex challenge facing science educators. In their recent article (Nehm & Schonfeld 2008), the authors explored the strengths, weaknesses, and insights provided…

I describe a quantitative approach to three case studies in evolution that can be used to challenge college freshmen to explore the power of natural selection and ask questions that foster a deeper understanding of its operation and relevance. Hemochromatosis, the peppered moth, and hominid cranial capacity are investigated with a common algebraic…

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…