Changing Museum Visitors’ Conceptions of Evolution

Abstract

We examined whether a single visit to an evolution exhibition contributed to conceptual change in adult (n = 30), youth, and child (n = 34) museum visitors’ reasoning about evolution. The exhibition included seven current research projects in evolutionary science, each focused on a different organism. To frame this study, we integrated a developmental model of visitors’ understanding of evolution, which incorporates visitors’ intuitive beliefs, with a model of free-choice learning that includes personal, sociocultural, and contextual variables. Using pre- and post-measures, we assessed how visitors’ causal explanations about biological change, drawn from three reasoning patterns (evolutionary, intuitive, and creationist), were modified as a result of visiting the exhibition. Whatever their age, background beliefs, or prior intuitive reasoning patterns, visitors significantly increased their use of explanations from the evolutionary reasoning pattern across all measures and extended this reasoning across diverse organisms. Visitors also increased their use of one intuitive reasoning pattern, need-based (goal-directed) explanations, which, we argue, may be a step toward evolutionary reasoning. Nonetheless, visitors continued to use mixed reasoning (endorsing all three reasoning patterns) in explaining biological change. The personal, socio-cultural, and contextual variables were found to be related to these reasoning patterns in predictable ways. These findings are used to examine the structure of visitors’ reasoning patterns and those aspects of the exhibition that may have contributed to the gains in museum visitors’ understanding of evolution.

Early evolution of evolutionary thinking: teaching biological evolution in elementary schools

“…Despite its fundamental importance in biology and many other research fields, studies have shown that biological evolution is not yet accepted as a valid scientific theory by an important fraction of citizens from different nations (Miller et al 2006), and that misconceptions about evolution are frequent and shared by the general public, students, and teachers from several countries (Rutledge and Warden 2000;Nehm and Reilly 2007;Prinou et al 2011;Spiegel et al 2012). Furthermore, these misconceptions revealed to be persistent and difficult to overcome, even when applying learning programs specifically designed to promote such conceptual changes (Bishop and Anderson 1986;Nehm and Reilly 2007).…”

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

“…To avoid this problem, a straightforward measure of acceptance that does not also measure understanding of evolutionary facts was used in this study (see Spiegel et al 2012). Acceptance was operationalized as the extent to which a student agrees that evolutionary processes explain the origin of diverse species, including humans, as this contentious issue is the one most likely to challenge religious belief and individual identity.…”

“…This was based on a measure validated in Spiegel et al (2012), which explored whether visitors to a museum changed their conceptions of evolution following their exposure to an exhibit on evolution. Most of the variables in the Spiegel et al (2012) study were based on open-ended scenarios, but the visitors were also asked the same three Likert scale questions on their acceptance of evolutionary origins as in the current study, though the organisms differed, being insects, birds, and humans.…”

Teleological reasoning about nature: intentional design or relational perspectives?

“…. .naturally biased to view nature as though it is intentionally created', [8], p. 77), has resonated throughout the cognitive sciences, influencing interpretations of concept development [9][10][11][12][13] science learning [8,14], religion and morality [15][16][17][18][19][20], and cross-cultural reasoning [7].…”