Background Teleology is one of the critical aspects of students’ intuitive concepts about living beings and, specifically, their evolution. This cognitive bias imposes a substantial restriction on the process of learning such content. In this work, we rely on epistemological, psychological and pedagogical analyses to substantiate an educational proposal centered on the concepts of epistemological obstacles and metacognitive vigilance. Results Based on Michael Ruse’s epistemological analysis, according to which teleology in biology persists because the scientific explanation of adaptation necessarily involves appeal to the metaphor of design, and on research in cognitive psychology, especially in relation to metacognition and self-regulated learning, we argue that the primary educational aim must be to encourage students to develop metacognitive skills to regulate the use of teleological reasoning. We develop our instructional proposal based on the didactic concepts of epistemological obstacles and metacognitive vigilance (consistent with epistemological and psychological analyses). Conclusion We briefly discuss the instructional implications of our analysis and some possible relationships between our proposal and other lines of research in psychology and science education.

Resumen: Numerosas investigaciones en didáctica de la biología muestran que el aprendizaje de la teoría de la evolución biológica es muy complejo. En el presente artículo exponemos los fundamentos teóricos de una propuesta didáctica basada en la modelización y en la metacognición sobre los obstáculos epistemológicos en relación con el aprendizaje de este contenido. Esta propuesta está orientada a que los 1 estudiantes construyan un modelo de evolución por selección natural y de especiación alopátrica, a la vez que reflexionan sobre las estrategias de aprendizaje utilizadas en dicho proceso y sobre los obstáculos epistemológicos que dificultan este trabajo. Además de desarrollar los fundamentos de la propuesta didáctica, ofrecemos algunos ejemplos concretos de actividades.

Essentialism is a way of reasoning that implies assuming that the members of a group share an immutable essence, and that the variation among the members of the group is negligible. Although this way of reasoning is useful for people in their everyday lives, it may pose difficulties in the learning of scientific models, particularly those of evolutionary biology. Essentialism, understood as an epistemological obstacle, requires some didactic work encouraging the development of metacognitive vigilance, in other words, the awareness and regulation of this way of thinking. In this article, we will characterize the processes of metacognitive regulation of essentialism that took place during a didactic sequence to teach evolution. The sequence was implemented in a secondary school in Argentina with 80 students. We will present some of the possibilities and difficulties of carrying out metacognitive regulation of essentialism in biology classrooms. From the use of thematic analysis, we have found that students seem to regulate essentialism in an implicit way during discussions with their classmates, at both the individual and social levels. Moreover, in the case of evolution learning, we distinguished two types of specific regulations: the regulation of 'typologism' and that of 'noise'. In this sense, we consider that essentialism is not regulated as a whole, but instead through some of its assumptions. This work will allow further thinking about the possibilities of promoting the metacognitive regulation of epistemological obstacles in biology classes.