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- Kuschmierz, Paul, et al.
(författare)
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European first-year university students accept evolution but lack substantial knowledge about it : A standardized European cross-country assessment
- 2021
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Ingår i: Evolution. - : BioMed Central (BMC). - 1936-6426 .- 1936-6434. ; 14:1, s. 1-22
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Background: Investigations of evolution knowledge and acceptance and their relation are central to evolution education research. Ambiguous results in this field of study demonstrate a variety of measuring issues, for instance differently theorized constructs, or a lack of standardized methods, especially for cross-country comparisons. In particular, meaningful comparisons across European countries, with their varying cultural backgrounds and education systems, are rare, often include only few countries, and lack standardization. To address these deficits, we conducted a standardized European survey, on 9200 first-year university students in 26 European countries utilizing a validated, comprehensive questionnaire, the “Evolution Education Questionnaire”, to assess evolution acceptance and knowledge, as well as influencing factors on evolution acceptance. Results: We found that, despite European countries’ different cultural backgrounds and education systems, European first-year university students generally accept evolution. At the same time, they lack substantial knowledge about it, even if they are enrolled in a biology-related study program. Additionally, we developed a multilevel-model that determines religious faith as the main influencing factor in accepting evolution. According to our model, knowledge about evolution and interest in biological topics also increase acceptance of evolution, but to a much lesser extent than religious faith. The effect of age and sex, as well as the country’s affiliation, students’ denomination, and whether or not a student is enrolled in a biology-related university program, is negligible. Conclusions: Our findings indicate that, despite all their differences, most of the European education systems for upper secondary education lead to acceptance of evolution at least in university students. It appears that, at least in this sample, the differences in knowledge between countries reflect neither the extent to which school curricula cover evolutionary biology nor the percentage of biology-related students in the country samples. Future studies should investigate the role of different European school curricula, identify particularly problematic or underrepresented evolutionary concepts in biology education, and analyze the role of religious faith when teaching evolution.
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| 2. |
- Stenlund, Jörgen I., 1959-, et al.
(författare)
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Design and validation of a deep evolutionary time visual instrument (DET-Vis)
- 2022
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Ingår i: Evolution. - : BioMed Central. - 1936-6426 .- 1936-6434. ; 15
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Understanding deep evolutionary time is crucial for biology education and for conceptualizing evolutionary history. Although such knowledge might help citizens contemplate their actions in the context of human existence, understanding deep evolutionary time is a demanding cognitive endeavor for students. The enormous magnitudes of evolutionary time are often visually communicated through phylograms and timelines. Given the importance of understanding evolutionary time in various scientific domains at large, there is a need for tools to gauge students’ knowledge about visually communicated deep evolutionary time. In response, we describe the design and validation of an instrument to measure knowledge about the visual representation of deep evolutionary time. Development, expert panel evaluation, and piloting of an initial 14 questions with 139 respondents resulted in a 10-item multiple-choice questionnaire. Subsequent collection and analysis of 212 responses validated the 10-item Deep Evolutionary Time Visual Instrument (DET-Vis). Identification of a single factor suggests a unidimensional construct that represents knowledge about the visual communication of deep evolutionary time. A Cronbach’s alpha of 0.73 yielded an acceptable internal consistency of the instrument. The items of the instrument discriminate well with discrimination coefficients between 0.25 and 0.53. The instrument is of moderate difficulty with difficulty indices ranging from 0.56 to 0.81. The seven-step methodological design and validation procedure of this study yielded a unidimensional, valid, and reliable ten-item deep evolutionary time visual test instrument. The instrument items probe both procedural and declarative aspects of the construct that could warrant future psychometric exploration. Use of DET-Vis in pedagogical practice could help support the teaching of deep evolutionary time at upper secondary and undergraduate levels.
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| 3. |
- Stenlund, Jörgen Ingemar, 1959-, et al.
(författare)
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Visualizing macroevolutionary timescales : students’ comprehension of different temporal representations in an animation
- 2019
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Ingår i: Evolution. - : SpringerNature. - 1936-6426 .- 1936-6434. ; 12:1, s. 1-15
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Background: Macroevolutionary time is a difficult idea to grasp and is considered to be a threshold concept in teaching and learning evolution. One way of addressing this subject is to use animations that represent evolutionary time. The aim of this descriptive and exploratory study was to investigate how various representations of time in an animation affect the way undergraduate students comprehend different temporal aspects of hominin evolution. Two factors, namely differences in timelines (the number of timelines with different scales) and the mode of the default animated time rate (either constant throughout the animation or decreasing as the animation progressed) were combined to give four different time representations. The temporal aspects were investigated using undergraduate students’ ability to find events at specific times, to comprehend relative order, to comprehend concurrent events, to estimate the duration of time intervals and their ability to compare the lengths of time intervals.Results: The results revealed that “finding events at specific times” near to the end of the animation (closer to present time), where the sequence of events appeared very quickly, was more difficult for groups working with animations with only one timeline. We also found that the ability to comprehend concurrent events can be impaired if several timelines are displayed and the animation speed is relatively high. The ability to estimate the duration of a time interval was more difficult for groups working with animations with only one timeline, especially at the end of the animation where the sequence of events occurred quickly. Making correct comparisons of time intervals was relatively independent of which animation was used with one notable exception: groups working with an animation featuring several timelines and a decreasing default animated time rate performed worst at comparing events with intervals that spanned parts of the timeline with different scales.Conclusions: Our results indicate that the choice of animation should depend on the teaching intention. However, a visualization with several timelines, and an animated time which slowed down toward present time, generated the best results for the majority of items tested. Temporal scale shift may interfere with the perception of time in cases where durations are compared.
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