From down house Landlord to Brazilian high school students: What has happened to evolutionary knowledge on the way?

Abstract

Evolution is considered an essential topic that brings to school a broader perspective of natural phenomena and of the nature of science. Most if not all research has shown that the result of the teaching of evolutionary theories is not positive in different parts of the world. Some have attributed the poor understanding shown by students to teaching style or to students' cognitive abilities. This article reports results of interviews and tests carried out with students after they had been taught the topic of evolution. By adopting a sociocultural perspective, before terming students' views “misconceptions,” attention was given to several different ways Charles Darwin's theories have been re‐interpreted by well‐known scholars and offered to the public. I have analyzed the approaches taken by Emanuel Radl (1873‐1942), John C. Greene, Robert Maxwell Young, and Ernst Mayr to assess the diverse ways Darwinism has been conceived. Attention was also given to the presentation of this controversial knowledge to the public in two major popular books written by respected scientists, Huxley and Kettlewell's Darwin and His World (1975) and Richard Dawkins' more recent The Blind Watchmaker (1989). These analyses revealed remarkable differences between what was written in Downe (Kent) a hundred years ago and what was heard at Sao Paulo (Brazil) nowadays. Students show very poor understanding of evolutionary theories. Their conceptions reveal evolution has been primarily related to the human species. Its meaning is understood as similar to progress, growth, multiplication, and improvement. Biological and cultural evolution are not clearly distinguished. Competition is misunderstood as pure violence, sometimes inevitable, and adaptation is considered an individual process that occurs during the organism's life span. Educational change may not depend just on teaching style and students' cognitive abilities. Modification of factual knowledge and epistemological gaps may be the result of a process of social reconceptualization of knowledge offered to students.

Using the logical basis of phylogenetics as the framework for teaching biology

“…Evolution is treated as an independent topic in the scientific curriculum of regular schools, unlinked to other biological disciplines -some textbooks bring the evolutionary theory in a single chapter, without even considering the role of the materialistic process of evolution in modeling the natural world. This is the rule in Brazilian schools (Bizzo, 1994) but the situation is not quite different in North America or other public schools around the world (Scott, 1997;Lerner, 2000;Antolin & Herbers, 2001;Chinsamy & Plagányi, 2008). The fact is that the traditional approach widely adopted in education becomes especially harmful to the understanding of evolution because the theory is removed from its broad natural context (Alles, 2001).…”

The role of metaphor in Darwin and the implications for teaching evolution

“…Some difficulties that have been pointed out in the research literature include the learners' difficulty in understanding the functionality of different kinds of explanations and when they apply (Halldén, 1988); the learners not distinguishing between biological and cultural evolution (Bizzo, 1994); learners tending to see adaptation as an individual adjustment, not as a population process (Bizzo, 1994); learners not considering variation within species (Bishop & Anderson, 1990); the idea that acquired traits are inherited, so-called Lamarckianism (Bishop & Anderson, 1990); and "that difficulty in seeing how change can result from the combined effects of random mutation and nonrandom selection is an especially persistent problem" (Bishop & Anderson, 1990, p. 422). On the basis of the present study, I propose two reasons why this theory is difficult to understand: (1) The metaphorical nature of the formulation of the theory in On the Origin of Species could result in certain-for the theory-incorrect ways of reasoning.…”

On Developing Content‐oriented Theories Taking Biological Evolution as an Example

“…Bishop and Anderson (1990), Bizzo (1994) and Brumby (1981), show that pupils and students believe that the environment is the main cause of the emergence of variation. In a study by Anderson, Fisher and Norman (2002), two multiple-choice questions were set about the origin of variation.…”

“…Bizzo, 1994;Halldén, 1988;Sinclair et al, 1997). Bizzo (1994) found, in an interview survey, that only 9 % of the pupils used a population-based explanation for evolutionary adaptation, i.e.…”

“…That adaptation is a difficult concept to learn when being taught the theory of evolution by natural selection has been documented for many different languages (Baalmann, Frerichs & Illner, 1998;Bizzo, 1994;Brumby, 1981;Engel Clough & Wood-Robinson, 1985a;Halldén, 1988;Jensen & Finley, 1995;Jungwirth, 1975;Thomas, 2000). One reason may be that this term is used for both everyday and scientific concepts (Brumby 1981).…”