A conceptual guide to natural history museum visitors' understanding of evolution

Abstract

Museum visitors are an ideal population for assessing the persistence of the conceptual barriers that make it difficult to grasp Darwinian evolutionary theory. In comparison with other members of the public, they are more likely to be interested in natural history, have higher education levels, and be exposed to the relevant content. If museum visitors do not grasp evolutionary principles, it seems unlikely that other members of the general public would do so. In the current study, 32 systematically selected visitors to three Midwest museums of natural history provided detailed openended explanations of biological change in seven diverse organisms. They were not told that these were evolutionary problems. Responses were coded as: informed naturalistic reasoning, featuring some understanding of key evolutionary concepts, novice naturalistic reasoning, featuring intuitive explanations that are also present in childhood, and creationist reasoning, featuring supernatural explanations. All visitors were mixed reasoners, using one or more of these patterns in different permutations across the seven organisms: 72% used a combination of informed naturalistic reasoning and novice naturalistic reasoning, while a further 28% added creationist reasoning to this mix. Correlational analyses indicated that for many visitors these reasoning patterns were coherent rather than fragmented. The theoretical model presented in this article contributes to an analysis of the developmental and cultural factors associated with these patterns. This could help educators working in diverse educational settings understand how to move visitors and students toward more informed reasoning patterns. ß

Teleological reasoning, not acceptance of evolution, impacts students’ ability to learn natural selection

“…Numerous studies also demonstrate widespread misunderstanding of natural selection among high school biology teachers (e.g., Nehm et al 2009) as well as high school students (e.g., Lawson and Worsnop 1992). Moreover, basic misconceptions of evolution are consistently endorsed or expressed by a broad range of the public, including adult visitors to natural history museums (Evans et al 2010), science graduate students (Gregory and Ellis 2009), and medical students (Bishop and Anderson 1990).…”

“…Misunderstandings of natural selection and other evolutionary mechanisms are not necessarily related to the pervasive resistance to the idea of evolutionary origins, especially of humans (Evans et al 2010;Hermann 2012;Kahan 2015). Inconsistent use of terms-such as acceptance, belief, understanding, and knowledge-and difficulties measuring those constructs, has made it challenging to achieve consensus on the nature of the relationship between understanding and acceptance (Smith 2009;Southerland et al 2001).…”

Persistence through function preservation

“…But as decades of research in scientific education suggest, teleological thinking is one of the primary obstacles in students' path to acquiring an adequate understanding of natural selection (see Galli andMeinardi, 2011 andKelemen, 2012 for an overview). For instance, students tend to think that a "personified "Mother Nature" responded to animals functional needs by generating or conferring the functional part with a view to preserving the animal's survival" (Kelemen, 2012, p. 4; see also Kampourakis & Zogza, 2008;Moore et al, 2002;and Gregory, 2009), such as by stretching a giraffe's neck so it could reach leaves on trees (e.g., Clough & Wood-Robinson, 1985;Demastes, Settlage, & Good, 1995;Evans et al, 2010;Jensen & Finley,1995;Kampourakis and Zogza, 2008). Summing up a range of this work, Kelemen (2012) suggests that people's teleological views are "embedded within a framework of intuitions characterizing Nature as a designing agent" (p. 6).…”

What’s the Matter with Kansas?: The Development and Confirmation of the Evolutionary Attitudes and Literacy Survey (EALS)

“…Therefore, museum visitors appear to (a) know more about evolution than non-visitors (McFadden et al 2007) and (b) hold more positive views. Accordingly, 28% of museum visitors engage in creationist reasoning compared to 45% of the general public (Evans et al 2006). For these reasons, it is important to assess respondents' exposure to evolution during youth (presumably due to high school education and/or parental influence) and self-selected exposure in adulthood.…”