This is the first in a series of five articles describing a national study of general education astronomy students' conceptual and reasoning difficulties with cosmology. In this paper, we describe the process by which we designed four new surveys to assess general education astronomy students' conceptual cosmology knowledge. These surveys focused…

Nairne, Thompson, and Pandeirada (2007) discovered a strong and rather general memory advantage for word material processed in a survival-related context. One possible explanation of this effect conceives survival processing as a special form of encoding: Nature specifically "tuned" our memory systems to process and remember…

First results from a 20-year survey of science knowledge and attitudes toward science among undergraduates are presented. Nearly 10,000 students taking astronomy as part of a general education requirement answered a set of questions that overlap a science literacy instrument administered to the general public by the National Science Foundation.…

The Measure of Acceptance of the Theory of Evolution (MATE) was constructed to be a single-factor instrument that assesses an individual's overall acceptance of evolutionary theory. The MATE was validated and the scores resulting from the MATE were found to be reliable for the population of inservice high school biology teachers. However, many…

Even 150 years after Charles Darwin published "On the Origin of Species," public school teachers still find themselves dealing with student resistance to learning about biological evolution. Some teachers deal with this pressure by undermining, deemphasizing, or even omitting the topic in their science curriculum. Others face the…

Scholars interested in play in humans should take note of the growing literature on play in other species, especially in light of the application of evolutionary approaches to virtually all areas of psychology. Although most research on animal play deals with mammals--particularly rodents, carnivores, and primates--studies have recorded play of…

Comments on Evolutionary psychology: Controversies, questions, prospects, and limitations by Confer et al. We applaud Confer et al.'s (February-March 2010) clarifications of the many misconceptions surrounding the use of evolutionary analyses in psychology. As they noted, such misunderstandings are common and result in a curious tendency of some…

For more than a century, the debate over evolution and creationism has affected academia at nearly every level. Although it distracts from core issues in many academic contexts, the debate can sometimes be pedagogically useful. It can be used pedagogically to examine how scientific predictions are made, how evidence is applied, and how it is…

Evolutionary psychologists often propose that humans carry around "stone-age" brains, along with a toolkit of cognitive adaptations designed originally to solve hunter-gatherer problems. This perspective predicts that optimal cognitive performance might sometimes be induced by ancestrally-based problems, those present in ancestral environments,…

The mirror system provided a natural platform for the subsequent evolution of language. In nonhuman primates, the system provides for the understanding of biological action, and possibly for imitation, both prerequisites for language. I argue that language evolved from manual gestures, initially as a system of pantomime, but with gestures…

This report examines K-12 science standards for fifty states and the District of Columbia, as well as the science assessment framework of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The reviewers' aim is to evaluate them for their intrinsic clarity, completeness, and scientific correctness. Their earlier evaluations, as well as those…

Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is considered to be the unifying theory for all life sciences (American Association for the Advancement of Science, AAAS, 1990; National Academy of Sciences, 1998; National Research Council, NRC, 1996; National Science Teachers Association, NSTA, 2010a) and as such, the biology topic has been…

The 2008 commercial video game "Spore" allowed more than a million players to design their own life forms. Starting from single-celled organisms players played through a caricature of natural history. Press coverage of the game's release offer two frames for thinking about the implications of the game. Some scientists and educators saw the game as…

The Anatomy Department at Tel-Aviv University Medical School offers its students an elective course of 26 didactic hours on human evolution. The course is open to students from all faculties, who must fulfill all academic requirements, without a prerequisite of a background in anatomy. Approximately 120 students attend annually, a third of them…

This work discusses the use of Darwin's "Tree of Life" as a didactic analogy and metaphor in teaching evolution. It investigates whether biology teachers of pupils from 17 to 18 years old know Darwin's text "Tree of Life". In addition, it examines whether those teachers systematically employ either the analogies present in that…