Evolutionary Content Knowledge, Religiosity and Educational Background of Slovene Preschool and Primary School Pre-Service Teachers

Abstract

Evolution by natural selection is the fundamental backbone of the life sciences. Therefore, it is important for teacher education programs to ensure graduates possess a strong knowledge of evolution in order to teach at all levels of biology education. The main aim was to investigate the impacts of the Slovene pre-service preschool and primary school teachers' religiosity and educational background on their evolutionary content knowledge. In the present study, understanding of five evolutionary topics, religiosity and educational background of 269 students was studied. Results show that students have a very poor understanding of evolution. They very often use teleological reasoning. Although many pieces of research have shown that religiosity can be in conflict with evolutionary theory, our findings show that religiosity does not significantly correlate with evolutionary knowledge nor to the educational background of students. However, for students' understanding of evolution, it is important how many years of biology lessons they had in secondary school. This should be better taken into account by educational policymakers because evolutionary principles are becoming increasingly relevant in medicine, agriculture and other socio-scientific topics.

Towards common ground in measuring acceptance of evolution and knowledge about evolution across Europe: a systematic review of the state of research

“…Only in the light of evolutionary knowledge, advances in medical research and the risks involved in biodiversity decline and climate change can truly be comprehended. However, numerous studies provided evidence of the difficulties students (e.g., Fiedler et al 2018;Göransson et al 2020;Torkar and Šorgo 2020) and even teachers (e.g., Athanasiou et al 2016;Tekkaya et al 2012;Yates and Marek 2013) have in understanding evolution. In the past decades, scientists and educators have explored understanding of evolution across a variety of educational levels and publics, in order to identify possible causal explanations and barriers that make evolution so difficult to understand (Ha et al 2012;Reiss and Harms 2019;Yates and Marek 2014).…”

“…Despite the fact that biology and nonbiology students reached similar levels of knowledge about evolution, the two groups differed significantly from each other (Kuschmierz et al 2020). Torkar and Šorgo (2020) used eight of twelve items of the KAEVO 2.0, Beniermann (2019) all nine items of KAEVO 1.0.…”

“…With this in mind, the results for pre-service teachers show partly alarmingly low levels of knowledge about evolution. Knowledge about evolution of pre-service teachers seems to be an issue (low to moderate knowledge about evolution or frequently occurring misconceptions) in several countries: Turkey (Akyol et al 2010(Akyol et al , 2012Deniz and Sahin 2016;Graf and Soran 2010;Keskin and Köse 2015;Šorgo et al 2014;Tekkaya et al 2011), Germany (Beniermann 2019;Fiedler et al 2017;Graf and Soran 2010), Greece Athanasiou and Mavrikaki 2014) Slovenia (Šorgo et al 2014;Torkar and Šorgo 2020); Czech Republic (Šorgo et al 2014); and Slovakia (Šorgo et al 2014). Pre-service teachers of different fields showed very low knowledge about evolution in two studies (Greece: Athanasiou and Mavrikaki 2014; Slovenia: Torkar and Šorgo 2020), low knowledge in two studies (Germany and Turkey: Graf and Soran 2010; Greece: Athanasiou and Mavrikaki 2014), and moderate knowledge in one study (Nehm et al 2013).…”

“…Two of three studies using the KAEVO reported multiple evidence for validity (content validity, internal structure) and reliability (Beniermann 2019;Kuschmierz et al 2020). One study did not provide any evidence neither for validity nor for reliability (Torkar and Šorgo 2020). Gefaell et al (2020), who used the KEE, provided one source of evidence for validity (external structure) and reliability (internal consistency).…”

“…Means were calculated for the current review based on the presented data inStanisavljevic et al (2013).4 Different interpretation ofAthanasiou et al (2016): low knowledge about evolution for biology and geology teachers; very low for all other groups of teachers. 5 Mean was calculated for the current review based on the presented data inTekkaya et al (2012).6 Mean was calculated for the current review based on the presented data inTorkar and Šorgo (2020).…”