Changes in acceptance of evolution in a college-level general education course

Evolutionary theory is central to the biological sciences, and to critical aspects of everyday life, and yet a significant proportion of Americans reject evolution. Our study sets out to examine the role of a second year college general education course in affecting students' acceptance of evol...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of biological education Vol. 51; no. 4; pp. 328 - 335
Main Authors Grossman, W. Eric, Fleet, Christine M.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Routledge 02.10.2017
Subjects
active learning
Adoption (Ideas)
Attitude Change
Beliefs
Biology
College Science
College Students
Course Content
education
Evolution
inquiry
paradigm shift
Pretests Posttests
Reacting to the Past
Science Instruction
Scores
Statistical Analysis
Student Attitudes
Student Surveys
Theories
North Carolina
Virginia
Tennessee
Kentucky
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Summary:Evolutionary theory is central to the biological sciences, and to critical aspects of everyday life, and yet a significant proportion of Americans reject evolution. Our study sets out to examine the role of a second year college general education course in affecting students' acceptance of evolution. We report three years of data using the Measure of Acceptance of the Theory of Evolution (MATE) instrument, and show that students make small and sometimes statistically significant gains in acceptance over the course of a semester. We found no evidence that including evolution topics in coursework caused an overall decrease in acceptance of evolution. We suggest that increased coursework on evolution topics, especially using interactive teaching methods, may increase acceptance of evolution.
ISSN:0021-9266
2157-6009
DOI:10.1080/00219266.2016.1233128