Relationship between achievement and students' acceptance of evolution or creation in an upper‐level evolution course

Abstract

Students often hold strong attitudes regarding topics they encounter during their studies, and many instructors feel that these attitudes can have strong effects on students' performance. We characterized students' attitudes toward evolution and investigated the influence of students' attitudes (precourse and post-course) regarding evolution on their performance in an evolution course, measured as their final grade. We found our students to hold positive attitudes toward evolution; these attitudes became more positive following the course. The most significant change in attitude occurred in the group of students initially undecided toward evolution. We also found that attitudes prior to the course had little influence on later achievement; however, at the end of the course, students' attitudes were positively related to final grades, although the effect was small. We argue that pedagogical techniques directly addressing students' attitudes help reduce the influence of attitudes (especially prior attitudes) on achievement. Anecdotal evidence from instructors has suggested that students' attitudes toward the subjects they study influence their performance in those subjects. In his meta-analysis of research investigating relationships between attitude and achievement, Willson (1983) concluded that attitude had a modest effect on later achievement for college students. However, recent research has been equivocal with respect to the relationship between attitude and achievement in science courses. For example, Willson, Akerman, & Malave (2000) found no association between students' attitudes and their later achievement in a college physics course. Similarly, Nicoll & Francisco (2001) reported that students' attitudes about math ability and about a particular course did not predict achievement in college-level physical chemistry. In contrast, Freedman (1997) found that attitude was positively and moderately correlated with achievement for high school

What’s the Matter with Kansas?: The Development and Confirmation of the Evolutionary Attitudes and Literacy Survey (EALS)

“…First, for example, Political/Religious Conservatism seems to hinder understanding of and attitudes of relevance toward evolutionary theory. Some authors argue that understanding is more important than acceptance (e.g., Ingram and Nelson 2006;Rutledge and Sadler 2007), and we agree to a point. But, knowledge and attitudes appear to be strongly linked, as evidenced by our singular Knowledge/Relevance higher order factor (see also Sinatra et al 2003;Lawson and Worsnop 1992 for an extended discussion of cause and effect).…”

Teleological reasoning, not acceptance of evolution, impacts students’ ability to learn natural selection

“…Inconsistent use of terms-such as acceptance, belief, understanding, and knowledge-and difficulties measuring those constructs, has made it challenging to achieve consensus on the nature of the relationship between understanding and acceptance (Smith 2009;Southerland et al 2001). Some researchers distinguish belief in evolution from acceptance, with belief based solely on intuition or faith, while acceptance is said to require an evaluation of the evidence (Abraham et al 2012;Akyol et al 2012;Ingram and Nelson 2006;Nadelson and Southerland 2009;Sinatra et al 2003). However, other researchers, use the terms synonymously and argue that the distinction is not useful (Nehm et al 2009).…”

Evolutionary Attitudes and Literacy Survey (EALS): Development and Validation of a Short Form

“…. E See also Ingram and Nelson (2006) F See also Rutledge and Sadler (2007) (R) Indicates reverse scored items Table 1 from Hawley et al (2011) reports the item variance explained by the underlying construct. Because the above model was identified by fixing the variances of the latent constructs to 1.00, the standardized factor loading for a particular item can be squared to determine the item's variance explained by the underlying factor .84…”

“…Several issues stand in the way of this conclusion, however. First, the subscales were all theoretically derived and informed by others' works based on non-Kansas samples (e.g., Carney et al 2008;Ingram and Nelson 2006;Miller et al 2006). Second, preliminary analyses (unpublished) suggest that the structures derived from Kansas and New York data are remarkably similar.…”