Henry Morris III, the chief executive of the Institute for Creation Research, said Tuesday that the proposed curriculum, taught in California, used faculty and textbooks "from all the top schools" along with, he said, the "value added" of challenges to standard teachings of evolution.
Biology faculty, teachers, textbook writers, and science journalists should carefully consider the necessity of "force-talk" given that it may elicit everyday force-dynamic reasoning models that fail to accurately explain evolutionary change. .
We view these elements of a model-centered biology epistemology as essential components of introductory biology, and they are a synthesis of results of our interviews of biology faculty and textbook analysis.
Given these results and the general indication among faculty members that textbooks "matter," researchers interested in university-level evolution education should address the presentation of evolution in textbooks, or at least in particular sections of these textbooks.
"When faculty recommend a textbook and people buy it on Amazon, we get some money.
This framework, the product of faculty interviews and textbook review, presents the foundations of the theoretical structures, basic models, and specific models that are to shape the first semester.
Many of the activities prioritized in the first years reaped immediate results (such as sharing textbooks and faculty across schools).
We then generated the knowledge statements shown in Table 4 by comparing student alternate conceptions with expert conceptions generated from a variety of sources, including the faculty workshops, the literature, textbooks, and the authors' personal knowledge.
Since a sizeable minority (about 25%) do not provide any definitions of evolution, we advise faculty to review their textbook choices (even with changes in editions) and to consider adjustments if their textbook belongs to this minority.
But just as faculty currently decide what textbook to use, they will still have the autonomy to choose what materials to include".
