In 2014, evolution through natural selection was introduced to the primary science National Curriculum in England for year 6 (ages 10-11). As teachers had little prior experience of teaching this concept, it provided a rare opportunity to study the effectiveness of different approaches. A study was developed to investigate the impact of…

The research completed by the authors into the teaching and learning of evolution and inheritance (2014 to 2018) seeks to understand the demands made by the revised National Curriculum in England (DfE, 2015) and to offer support. The commitment of the authors to applied research assumes more useful outcomes are likely when studies are conducted…

When Chris Hatcher joined the Primary Evolution Project team at the University of Reading, his goal was to find effective strategies to teach evolution in a way that keeps children engaged and enthused. Hatcher has collaborated with colleagues at the University's Institute of Education to break the evolution unit down into distinct topics and…

"Evolution" is an area of the curriculum in which children show great interest and enthusiasm to learn more. They also bring considerable prior (though incomplete) knowledge from their informal "life worlds". Most children have encountered the term "evolution" from an early age and tend to define it in terms of…

The short view of inheritance is that it is about what every organism gets from its parents, one generation to the next. Young children appreciate that offspring have strong similarities with their parents. A longer perspective embraces the similarities and diversity in relatives' features; it includes the characteristics of predecessors within…

In practice, in the classroom, teachers are still faced with the issue of what to say to children if they believe that evolution conflicts with their own or other people's religious faith. When asked how they plan to respond, most teacher trainees and teachers respond that they will be a neutral chair and try to give children a balanced view.…

Evolution offers an intellectually satisfying and extremely well-supported explanation for the diversity of life in the natural world, its similarities and differences, how changes occur and how new life forms have developed. There are plenty of reasons to anticipate the teaching of evolution with exhilaration. In recent years, the issue of…

Evolution and inheritance appear in the new National Science Curriculum for England, which comes into effect from September 2014. In the curriculum documents, it is expected that pupils in year 6 (ages 10-11) should be taught to: (1) recognise that living things have changed over time; (2) recognise that living things produce offspring of the same…