Darwinian evolution is difficult to understand because of conceptual barriers stemming from intuitive ideas. This study examined understanding of evolution in 52 students (M = 14.48 years, SD = 0.89) before and after a guided field trip to a natural history museum and in a comparison group of 18 students (M = 14.17 years, SD = 0.79) who did not attend the trip. During the trip, students learned about the "Oxford Evolution Debate." Students were interviewed before and after the trip and were asked about evolutionary processes in humans, algae, seals, finches, and Tasmanian tigers. Students' answers were coded as relying on informed naturalistic reasoning (INR; i.e., some understanding of Darwinian evolution), novice naturalistic reasoning (NNR; i.e., intuitive explanations from folk biology and psychology), and creationist reasoning (CR). Students who attended the trip were more likely to increase their use of INR and decrease their use of NNR than students who did not attend the trip. CR was rarely supported. The majority of both groups of students invoked more than one type of reasoning across the questions. The findings are interpreted in relation to use of multiple epistemologies and the benefits of informal learning environments for increasing understanding of Darwinian evolution. C 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed

This study examined age differences in young people's understanding of evolution theory in secondary school. A second aim of this study was to propose a new coding scheme that more accurately described students' conceptual understanding about evolutionary theory. We argue that coding schemes adopted in previous research may have overestimated students' grasp of evolutionary concepts. A total of 106 students aged 12, 14, and 16 took part in individual interviews investigating their understanding of evolution. Using the new coding scheme, we found that while 16-year olds were more likely than 12-year olds to endorse scientific concepts when answering a question about finches, their understanding of natural selection, however, did not generalize to the other four questions. Furthermore, students began to incorporate relevant terminology (e.g., adapt, evolve, etc.) and structure their explanations using relevant language at around age 14. Students often used relevant terminology without having a more advanced understanding of evolutionary theory. Instead, they used the relevant terms in a colloquial rather than a scientific sense. Implications of the current findings for teaching and theory are discussed.

This study investigated the ways in which families constructed an understanding of evolution exhibits at a natural history museum. We examined museum visitors’ use of exhibit text and the types of evolution-related talk in parent-child conversations while visiting the chimp/human and the artiodactyl exhibits. Participants were 52 families with children aged 2- to 11-years who agreed to be digitally recorded. Analyses of parent-child conversations indicated that families who read exhibit text were more likely to stay longer at the exhibits and to encounter the intended content of the exhibits than families who did not read the text. On-topic conversations tended to focus on labelling and describing the exhibit content rather than talking about evolutionary concepts. Physical descriptions of exhibit displays allowed children to make inferences about novel entities (i.e., those in the exhibits) based on prior knowledge