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.…

What contributes to science skepticism? Virtually every U.S. high-school student is required to study biology, at minimum, to earn a diploma. But the exact content of the course varies from state to state. This article investigates the role of state standards for high-school science content in shaping knowledge and attitudes about…

In an introductory geology course on vertebrate fossils, a new object-based classroom exercise was designed to enhance students' appreciation for evidence of evolution as a "tinkering" process, specifically in modern organisms with which everyone is familiar. During the dissection of a popular college late-night snack (barbeque-style…

Students who enter college with a solid grounding in, and positive attitudes toward, evolutionary science are better prepared for and achieve at higher levels in university-level biology courses. We found highly significant, positive relationships between student knowledge of evolution and attitudes toward evolution, as well as between…

Students often have misconceptions about natural selection as they misuse a direct causal schema to explain the process. Natural selection is in fact an emergent process where random interactions lead to changes in a population. The misconceptions stem from students' lack of emergent schema for natural selection. In order to help students…

The long geological time needed for landform development and evolution poses a challenge for understanding and appreciating the processes involved. The Web-based Interactive Landform Simulation Model--Grand Canyon (WILSIM-GC, http://serc.carleton.edu/landform/) is an educational tool designed to help students better understand such processes,…

This paper argues that teaching of concepts is deeply rooted in human phylogeny. The basis of this argument is a consideration of the type of knowledge used to make handaxes, a tool that is found in the archaeological record beginning around 1.8 million years ago. A distinction is made between the human capacity for teaching concepts, which has a…

Before beginning a series of presentations on evolution, it would be prudent to survey the general level of students' understanding of prerequisite basic concepts of reproduction, heredity, ontology, and phenotypic diversity so that teachers can avoid devoting time to well-known subjects of general knowledge and can spend more time on subjects…

This critical analysis examined research on evolution in the United States between the years 2000-2014, spanning early classroom implementation of the National Science Education Standards to current research findings. First, we sought to understand how the research literature published between 2000 and 2014 contributed to knowledge of evolution…

Comic books employ a complex interplay of text and images that gives them the potential to effectively convey concepts and motivate student engagement. This makes comics an appealing option for educators trying to improve science literacy about pressing societal issues involving science and technology. Here, we report results from the first…

When students make the transition from one curriculum to another, with significant overlap of content, the challenge is not so much to impart new information but rather to tap into students' existing knowledge base. The purpose of this study was to determine if achievement in an external examination that requires analysis could be enhanced by the…

Explores the influence of offering different instructions to undergraduate students prior to their learning an expository text on evolutionary biology. Participants were asked to either explain, summarize, or listen to another's explanation. Overall, explainers outperformed summarizers. Moreover, the teach-through-explanation condition had the…