Oklahoma students know less about evolution after Biology I than they did before taking it

[LostOne4Ever]

[div class="excerpt" style="background-color:#dcdcdc; padding-bottom:5px; border:1px solid #bfbfbf; border-bottom:none; border-radius:0.4615em 0.4615em 0em 0em; box-shadow:3px 3px 3px #999999;"]The Raw Story[div class="excerpt" style="background-color:#f0f0f0; border:1px solid #bfbfbf; border-top:none; border-radius:0em 0em 0.4615em 0.4615em; box-shadow:3px 3px 3px #999999;"][center] [/center]

A study published in the latest edition of Evolution: Education and Outreach demonstrated “the average student…completed the Biology I course with increased confidence in their biological evolution knowledge yet with a greater number of biological evolution misconceptions and, therefore, less competency in the subject.”

The study, conducted by Tony Yates and Edmund Marek, tested biology teachers and students in 32 Oklahoma public high schools via a survey the pair called “the Biological Evolution Literacy Survey.” The survey was administered to the teachers first, to get a benchmark of their grasp of evolutionary theory. The survey was then administered twice to the students — once before they took the required Biology I course, and once after they had completed it.

Yates and Marek found that prior to instruction, students possessed 4,812 misconceptions about evolutionary theory; after they completed the Biology I course, they possessed 5,072. Of the 475 students surveyed, only 216 decreased the number of misconceptions they believed, as opposed to 259 who had more of them when they finished the course than before they took it.

“There is little doubt,” they argued, “that teachers may serve as sources of biological evolution-related misconceptions or, at the very least, propagators of existing misconceptions.”

More at link.

[Igel]

1. That's the kind of thing that should set off "huh?!" bells in your mind.

Can't get to the data behind the paywall.

But I think I found the data, more or less, in a publicly available PDF.

http://www.oklahomascienceteachersassociation.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/EEO-Article-2-Yates-Marek-copy2.pdf

There you see that two questions really had a big jump.

"Survival of the fittest" means that "only the strong survive."
"If webbed feet is being selected for, all individuals in the next generation will have more webbing on their feet than do individuals in their parents' generation".
"Evolution is a totally random process" also scored a reasonable increase.

Others vary here and there. A lot of them have little bumps here and there. More questions show improvements rather than worsening , overall. Except at the end, there's a small worsening because of a few questions.

To be honest, if you're not a biology student paying close attention during the class; if you're a biology student quickly taking the survey to get to the end, some of the mistakes are completely reasonable *and* unrelated to any view of creationism I know of. Even the "evolution is a totally random process" also fails to necessarily be related to creationism, even if genetic mutations are: Evolutions not random, but that doesn't mean its guided. A constraint on evolution is survival and reproduction, and those aren't random.

[Enrique]

2. here is an important point

Yates and Marek note that the problem may not entirely be the teachers fault, as some research indicates that “the topic of evolution is too complex for high school students, most of whom still think at the concrete level, lacking the cognitive development necessary to comprehend biological evolution-related concepts fully and are therefore unable to construct solid accurate understandings of the topic.”

[genwah]

3. Well, that's insulting. If evolution is too "complex" we shouldn't let teens near religion, either.