No abstract

Evolution is a key concept of biology, fundamental to understand the world and address important societal problems, but research studies show that it is still not widely understood and accepted. Several factors are known to influence evolution acceptance and understanding, but little information is available regarding the impacts of the curriculum on these aspects. Very few curricula have been examined to assess the coverage of biological evolution. The available studies do not allow comparative analyses, due to the different methodologies employed by the authors. However, such an analysis would be useful for research purposes and for the development of appropriate educational policies to address the problem of a lack of evolution acceptance in some countries. In this paper we describe the steps through which we developed a valid and reliable instrument for curricula analysis known as FACE: “Framework to Assess the Coverage of biological Evolution by school curricula.” This framework was developed based on the “Understanding Evolution Conceptual Framework” (UECF). After an initial pilot study, our framework was reformulated based on identified issues and experts’ opinions. To generate validity and reliability evidence in support of the framework, it was applied to four European countries’ curricula. For each country, a team of a minimum of two national and two foreign coders worked independently to assess the curriculum using this framework for content analysis. Reliability evidence was estimated using Krippendorf's alpha and resulted in appropriate values for coding the examined curricula. Some issues that coders faced during the analysis were discussed and, to ensure better reliability for future researchers, additional guidelines and one extra category were included in the framework. The final version of the framework includes six categories and 34 subcategories. FACE is a useful tool for the analysis and the comparison of curricula and school textbooks regarding the coverage of evolution, and such results can guide curricula development.

According to literature, science-based stories can not only trigger students' curiosity about scientific concepts but also increase their understanding of them as well as to facilitate the retention of information in students' memory. It is a common practice for elementary school teachers to create stories in order to teach several topics. To investigate the ability of pre-service teachers in Science story writing, we selected the topic of karst caves which it can be studied through many disciplines (i.e. Geography, Geology, Biology, Chemistry, Environmental education, Ecology) according to the Greek curriculum. Moreover, although karst caves are part of Greece's geological history, they are neither taught nor extensively mentioned in the Greek Primary and Secondary Education curricula. In this research, we examined whether Greek pre-service primary school teachers are able to create complete science-based stories about karst caves, by following the necessary didactic transposition of scientific concepts and the key elements in structure and plot of a such a story. For this purpose, we assessed by content analysis 100 pre-service teachers' written stories. The results revealed that most of the participants achieved to create sufficient stories in structure and plot, whereas they did not achieve to transpose the necessary scientific concepts that they had included in their writing.