Using Human Examples to Teach Evolution to High School Students: Increasing Understanding and Decreasing Cognitive Biases and Misconceptions

Abstract

Life science educators seek pedagogical approaches to help students better understand natural selection, but students’ understanding is impeded by cognitive biases, misconceptions, and resistance to learning about the content due to perceived cultural and religious conflicts. In this chapter, we review the impact of implementing constructivist, guided inquiry ‘mini-units’ that focus on examples of natural selection in humans on advanced US high school students’ understanding of key concepts, and the frequency of cognitive biases and misconceptions. We also describe the effect of supplementing this instruction with lessons that help teachers negotiate student resistance to learning about evolution due to religious or cultural beliefs. Data from students in Advanced Placement (AP) Biology courses in the classrooms of ten different teachers from eight states show significant gains in evolution understanding from pretest to posttest in students’ understanding of variation, heritability, differential survival, and frequency/distribution, and a significant decrease in cognitive biases and misconceptions when responding to prompts about change in both human and mice. When the instruction was supplemented with activities to help teachers create a supportive classroom environment in which religious or cultural resistance was managed, we observed significantly greater gains in student understanding in the same four key concepts and significantly larger decreases in the teleology cognitive bias and need misconception using a mouse example and no significant differences in a human example. Overall, the results from this design-based study suggest that focusing on human examples in a constructivist pedagogical approach while negotiating students’ perceived conflicts to learning about evolution may be effective and warrants further study.