Biology teachers often dismiss evolution

[moobu2]

Almost a century after the famed Scopes Monkey Trial, battles over teaching evolution versus creationism in US public schools persist - but they have shifted to individual classrooms where teachers have a vast influence over whether evolution is present, a new study finds. In the courtroom, advocates for creationist thinking, or its re-packaged equivalent "intelligent design", have lost nearly every major case in the last 40 years. While this has undoubtedly helped set a high scientific standard for state curricula, the study finds that a majority of public high school teachers are either uncomfortable with teaching evolution or doubtful of its accuracy.

“The official state content standards actually have very little impact on the way teachers teach in the classroom,” says Eric Plutzer, a political scientist from Pennsylvania State University in University Park, who co-authored the paper, which appears 27 January in Science. The major factors affecting what teachers taught were their own personal values and beliefs as well as the values and culture of their community, he adds.

Plutzer and his co-author, Michael Berkman, also of Pennsylvania State University, used a nationally representative sample of 926 public biology instructors and found that less than a third of teachers consistently crafted their lesson plans around evolution. At the same time, about 13% of teachers spent an hour or more of class time presenting creationism “in a positive light”.

In the most conservative school districts, nearly 40% of teachers do not personally accept human evolution (compared to 11% in the least conservative districts). But the majority of US teachers, approximately 60%, were not advocates of either evolutionary biology or nonscientific alternatives.

These “cautious 60 percent” generally teach a watered down version of evolution and often disassociate themselves from the content, says Plutzer. Many were not well trained in basic evolutionary biology and did not feel themselves equipped to answer controversial questions from students, parents, or school board members, he says.

Some of these teachers avoided teaching the more controversial macroevolution, which describes new species arising from old ones, while still describing microevolution, which can explain how bacteria develop antibiotic resistance. Others taught evolution in order that their students could pass standardized tests, though they did not believe in it unequivocally. Finally, a large number of this group exposed students to all positions in the hopes that they could make up their own minds.



http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2011/01/biology_teachers_often_dismiss.html">LINK

[bluestateguy]

1. I once had a biology teacher who was a devout Christian

I don't know if he was a fundamentalist by definition because he never taught us to reject evolution or any of that intelligent design crap either. He was against abortion, but there were only one or two times that he let slip a few barbs on this issue. In any case, he was a very strong Christian. He was a great teacher who communicated the material extremely well and made the subject interesting.

[moobu2]

3. I had this Science teacher once (true story)

who bragged about never missing a Sunday going to church, in something like 30 years. I thought I was a Christian at the time myself. One spring, these birds made a nest in the rain drain pipe just outside the classroom window. When the eggs hatched, the little chicks would screech as the parents arrived at the nest with food. This screeching sound that the baby birds made irritated this teacher to no end. I don't know why really, it wasn't that loud, and only seemed to bother her. When the parent birds would arrive with more food, and the chicks would start their screeching, my teacher would get visibly irritated and pace back and forth, going to the window where the birds nest was, and hitting the drain pipe with a stick, then going back to her desk to try to forget about it, which she wasn't able to do. Anyway, she eventually had someone stuff wads of paper in the rain drain and starved the chicks to death. No more baby chick screeches though.

I seriously hated her.

[ZombieHorde]

2. This is craziness directly motivated by religion. nt

[Tesha]

4. America: Rapidly becoming the laughingstock of the Civilized World. (NT)

[Odin2005]

5. Many are afraid of angering fundy parents.

[Igel]

7. I'd also suggest that many are afraid of having

class time gobbled up by silly debates and behavior problems.

Ever see a class discussing the Big Bang where the anti-fundies are making snide remarks (remarkably similar to a lot I read on DU) that do nothing to advance understanding or discussion, but just to irritate and annoy other kids? Like that's a behavior problem that a teacher needs.

Or foolish questions.

Take a Hawking quote that I ran into a while back: "If we could understand what caused the Big Bang we'd have the answer to the eternal question, Why are we here?" It's the right question, but the wrong content (actually, it's confusing levels of scope): When a Xian asks it, even rhetorically, he doesn't have in mind cause and effect, he has in mind purpose. It's the difference between asking, "Why am I here in the park?" and saying "because it's spring and the roses are blooming" and "because I I turned right on Jefferson instead of left on Washington." I seriously doubt that resolving the origin of the universe will suddenly endow it with purpose--it'll simply find the first cause. He didn't seem to understand the difference in meaning masked by identicality of words, for all his brilliance; fundies, for all their self-avowed wisdom, do no better.

Science teachers have no point in trying to answer questions as to purpose, beyond sheer utilitarianism. I don't blame them for skirting the issue.

(Oddly, the two political scientists reponsible for the study deal with issues of democracy while decrying the idea that a community could want something taught that a minority believe must be taught. Apparently true democracy is imposed on the many by the few, as the few see fit. /snark off)

[moobu2]

6. "I don't believe that a creature crawled out of the sea and became a human being one day."

During an appearance on HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher" on Friday night, Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.) stated clearly that he does not believe in the process of evolution.
"I believe I came from God, not from a monkey so the answer is no," he said, laughing, when asked if he subscribes to the theory. Later in the segment he added, "I don't believe that a creature crawled out of the sea and became a human being one day."
According to a Gallup poll released last month, 40 percent of Americans believe God is responsible for creating human life in its current form roughly 10,000 years ago.

he survey found that 52 percent of Republicans believe in creationism. 34 percent of Democrats and independents maintain the same view, the poll showed. An excerpt of analysis from Gallup:

The significantly higher percentage of Republicans who choose a creationist view of human origins reflects in part the strong relationship between religion and politics in contemporary America. Republicans are significantly more likely to attend church weekly than are others, and, as noted, Americans who attend church weekly are most likely to select the creationist alternative for the origin of humans.

Welcome to the 19th century

[struggle4progress]

8. Evolutionary theory sits in a large body of scientific thought, involving the age

of the solar system, the dating of geological processes, the fossil record, the mechanisms and speed of genetic change, and various other topics

Many of these fields have required enormous investments of labor and resources to construct, and the explanation of the conclusions cannot be provided in a few sentences. For example, dating a geological stratum might presuppose substantial investigations of the strata above and below, and the actual context of the stratum may not be apparent in all outcroppings. Similarly, insight into a particular fossil may require substantial knowledge of a much larger record

Unfortunately, the typical teacher in the public schools may have a college education which concentrated largely on educational theory, with (perhaps) the equivalent of a minor in the field in which the person teaches; some will go on to earn master's degrees, but many may eventually teach subjects in which they have little background. The situation will not change unless priorities of school districts and state boards change. Under these conditions, it is perhaps unreasonable to expect that most biology teachers will master much geology, paleontology, radiometric dating, or other topics needed for the teaching of evolutionary theory: they are already working full time trying to teach basic biology. One predictable result is that much public school teaching is simply authoritarian: students are told what to swallow and when to regurgitate -- but, of course, one cannot teach basic scientific reasoning by such methods