Classroom Activity 1 is designed to be used at the start of instruction on evolutionary theory, in classrooms where teachers are aware that many of their students have been exposed to only negative and/or mistaken notions of evolutionary theory.
Following a single iteration of targeted instruction on evolutionary relationships, student interpretations significantly improved, but to just more than half of groups and less than half of individuals providing correct answers and reasoning for taxa-relatedness questions.
Thus, it was not surprising that attendance during targeted, active-learning instruction on evolutionary relatedness was a significant predictor of correct taxa-relatedness reasoning.
After the initial homework and targeted instruction on evolutionary relationships, and disregarding the individual component of the evolution unit exam (unreliable for correctness coding), approximately half of the students demonstrated such understanding across multiple assessments (Table 4).
In a national survey, more than 300 college biology faculty agreed on the importance of evolution instruction in introductory biology sequences, including instruction on evolutionary mechanisms and phylogenetics (Gregory et al., 2011).
Views about the instruction of teachers regarding evolutionary theory and the necessity of said instruction: 7.
Indeed, the debate on the perception of evolutionary theory, instruction and learning (Woods and Scharmann 2001;Berkman et al. 2008;Donnelly et al. 2009;Thanukos et al. 2010) and on the factors of misunderstanding and misconceptions about acceptance and learning of evolution is very lively at the scholastic level (Shtulman et al. 2008;Sinatra et al. 2008 Cho et al. 2011).
Given the benefits to undergraduates of the interdisciplinarity of evolutionary theory and instruction in peer review, EvoS Journal has laudable goals, which presumably offer the chance for students to improve their writing and thinking and interpersonal and organizational skills outside of the classroom.
Since many teachers explicitly question the validity of evolutionary theory in their instruction and most have several misconceptions about evolution, it is plausible that students in their classes are not receiving adequate instruction about evolution.
