Metacognitive Regulation of Essentialism in the Teaching of Evolution

Abstract

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.

Visual resources and interaction in Grade 4 science teaching—Moving in and out of discourse when exploring concepts of evolution and adaption

“…Furthermore, while disciplinary visual support images and whiteboard drawings employed by the teacher drew attention to variation between individuals of the same species, the naturalistic images of individual animals did not. While the naturalistic images spurred the students' thoughts about advantageous traits, they may also have promoted an essentialist perspective of immutable characteristics (Kampourakis, 2014;Perez et al, 2022) since the teacher and the student mostly used the displayed individuals to refer to the whole species. To remedy this, it would have been possible to expand the use of naturalistic images to discuss the significance of variation between individuals, for example, concerning size or coloration.…”

“…Another prevalent intuitive conception is essentialist notions of organisms having unchanging characteristics, which creates problems in understanding variation between individuals of the same species (Kampourakis, 2014;Perez et al, 2022). Other alternative conceptions include explaining evolution in terms of design.…”

“…As discussed by Gregory (2009) and Ha and Nehm (2014), Darwin himself explained the loss of eyes among cave‐dwelling animals in terms of disuse rather than natural selection. Another prevalent intuitive conception is essentialist notions of organisms having unchanging characteristics, which creates problems in understanding variation between individuals of the same species (Kampourakis, 2014; Perez et al, 2022). Other alternative conceptions include explaining evolution in terms of design.…”

“…In a study focusing on the teaching of older students, Gresch and Martens (2018) suggest that students would benefit from interactional support in contrasting legitimate teleological explanations in everyday life with mistakable counterparts in the context of science. For such a purpose, Perez et al's (2022) study showed how a didactic sequence promoting discussions based on varying texts and material can promote secondary school students' metacognitive awareness of essentialist notions.…”

Influence of self‐assessment and conditional metaconceptual knowledge on students' self‐regulation of intuitive and scientific conceptions of evolution

“…Whereas an essentialist view conflicts with an appropriate understanding of natural selection and genetics, it supports rapid and accurate learning in other contexts, including everyday contexts and even some scientific contexts. When variability among members of a category is disregarded as inessential noise, it reduces the complexity of information that needs to be processed and allows for making predictions about members of a category (Coley & Tanner, 2015;Perez et al, 2022;Shtulman & Calabi, 2012;Shtulman & Schulz, 2008). In science, this is helpful for making predictions about ontogenetic development: For example, based on our knowledge that rhinoceroses have horns as a shared characteristic, we can predict that a young rhinoceros with a flat nose will grow a horn over time.…”