Evolution in Biology Education: Sparking Imaginations and Supporting Learning

Jenkins, Kristin

doi:10.1007/s12052-009-0158-8

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…As such, evolution is a major unifying concept that links all the sub-disciplines of biology (National Academy of Sciences (NAS) 1998; National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) 2003; National Research Council (NRC) 2011). Knowledge on evolution is essential for students to integrate concepts in a wider framework and to achieve a clear understanding of the topics in biology curricula and of biological systems in general (Jenkins 2009). But evolution is not an exclusive property of the natural world and knowledge on evolutionary mechanisms also deeply impacted research areas as distinct as medicine, psychology, engineering, economics, informatics, and linguistics (Bull and Wichman 2001).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Campos

Sá-Pinto

2013

Evo Edu Outreach

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Background: Evolution is considered the unifying concept in biology and is also a key theory underlying many areas of human knowledge. Teaching evolution from as early as kindergarten allows children to better understand concepts related with the biological world and prevents the development of negative feelings and misconceptions about the theory of evolution. However, evolution is absent from most of the educational curricula in the early school grades, even though some of its central concepts are common contents in the curricula of these initial years. Methods: In the present paper we present a set of activities that can be performed with elementary school students to explore and understand evolution and its impact on biological diversity, while promoting critical thinking and scientific literacy. These activities explore concepts of intra-specific diversity, genealogy and inheritance, natural selection, genetic drift, and systematics, using contexts that are familiar to students, and were articulated with the Portuguese official curriculum. Similar contents are present in elementary school curricula of other countries, namely Brazil, United Kingdom, France, United States of America, Canada, or Mozambique, and therefore the same activities can potentially be used in many different countries. Results and conclusions: Regardless of the complexity of the theory behind these concepts, our experience revealed that using these activities children were able to understand basic evolutionary mechanisms and to apply this knowledge in real case scenarios.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Campos

Sá-Pinto

2013

Evo Edu Outreach

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“…The use of phylogenetic information is crucial for solving pure and applied problems in biology (Brooks and McLennan, ; Faith, ; Magurran, ) and has enormous potential for outreach and education (Jenkins, ; MacDonald and Wiley, ). Thus, a central challenge for developing a phylogenetic workflow and serving big trees is to anticipate correctly a plethora of use cases (see Box 1) and to develop a general cyberinfrastructure accordingly (Goff et al., ; Stoltzfus et al., ).…”

Section: Disseminating the Tree Of Lifementioning

confidence: 99%

A roadmap for global synthesis of the plant tree of life

Eiserhardt

Antonelli

Bennett

et al. 2018

American J of Botany

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Providing science and society with an integrated, up-to-date, high quality, open, reproducible and sustainable plant tree of life would be a huge service that is now coming within reach. However, synthesizing the growing body of DNA sequence data in the public domain and disseminating the trees to a diverse audience are often not straightforward due to numerous informatics barriers. While big synthetic plant phylogenies are being built, they remain static and become quickly outdated as new data are published and tree-building methods improve. Moreover, the body of existing phylogenetic evidence is hard to navigate and access for non-experts. We propose that our community of botanists, tree builders, and informaticians should converge on a modular framework for data integration and phylogenetic analysis, allowing easy collaboration, updating, data sourcing and flexible analyses. With support from major institutions, this pipeline should be re-run at regular intervals, storing trees and their metadata long-term. Providing the trees to a diverse global audience through user-friendly front ends and application development interfaces should also be a priority. Interactive interfaces could be used to solicit user feedback and thus improve data quality and to coordinate the generation of new data. We conclude by outlining a number of steps that we suggest the scientific community should take to achieve global phylogenetic synthesis.

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“…According to Jenkins (2009), the natural sciences must be permeable to evolutionary theories since evolution is the key concept to understanding the living world. The theory of evolution can be portrayed as the aggregating factor of scientific instruction (Smith 2010;Yetişir and Kahyaoğlu 2005), allowing educators to differentiate science from other forms of human thought (National Academy of Sciences 1998).…”

Section: Teaching Evolution In Portugalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evolutionism and the Teaching of Science: How Portugal Has Been “Playing with the Big Tree of Evolution”

Assis

Carvalho

2012

Evo Edu Outreach

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The concept of evolution is fundamental to the teaching of biological sciences. Nevertheless, it seems frequently neglected and/or forgotten in our classrooms and absent from the school syllabus. These difficulties are present today in the Portuguese educational system, especially concerning the issue of human evolution. To overcome this difficulty, a multidisciplinary pilot project entitled Playing with the Big Tree of Evolution was developed by a nonprofit association called Group of Studies in Human Evolution in Portuguese schools and in other public and private organizations. Combining non-formal and informal apprenticeship, the project is composed of a set of pedagogical and experimental activities that aim to promote the broad concept of human evolution as well as to demystify the anthropocentric perspective that places humans at the top of the chain of life.

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Evolution in Biology Education: Sparking Imaginations and Supporting Learning

Cited by 4 publications

References 14 publications

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

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

A roadmap for global synthesis of the plant tree of life

Evolutionism and the Teaching of Science: How Portugal Has Been “Playing with the Big Tree of Evolution”

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