Teaching and learning relies on age-appropriate, credible formal (e.g., textbooks, textbook supplements) and informal (e.g., trade-books) curricular texts. Previous research traced American publishers' self-censorship about human evolution within twentieth-century textbooks. This study, informed by the latest scientific understandings, engaged in…

Evolutionary theory (ET) is the unifying theory of Life Sciences, but it is largely misunderstood and the target of dispute in many countries, mainly because of conflicts with religious beliefs. Brazil is a country with a culture that is deeply rooted belief in God. In this paper, we report a study in Brazil where we applied a 12-question…

The purpose of this study is to develop a framework for analyzing classroom argumentation that includes a process of rebutting. A most commonly used framework to analyze argument in science education is Toulmin's Argumentation Pattern. It is useful for analyzing argumentation but it cannot represent the complexity of students' rebuttals during…

Scientific representations of human evolution often embrace stereotypes of ethnicity and gender that are more aligned with socio-cultural discourses and norms than empirical facts. The present study has two connected aims: to understand how ethnicity and gender are represented in an exhibition about human evolution, and to understand how that…

The name Lamarck is very well known in the teaching of biology, being associated with an early effort to explain evolution. Nevertheless, when evolution is taught in the classroom, the only Lamarckian ideas that stand out are related to the 'inheritance of acquired characters', invariably illustrated by the example of the lengthening of giraffes'…

Teleological reasoning is viewed as a major hurdle to evolution education, and yet, eliciting, interpreting, and reflecting upon teleological language presents an arguably greater challenge to the evolution educator and researcher. This article argues that making explicit the role of behavior as a causal factor in the evolution of particular…

Despite the importance of evolution to understand living phenomena, evolution teaching confronts several tensions, especially with respect to teachers' and students' religious beliefs. These aspects have been widely investigated in the USA and Europe. However, little empirical research has been done on this issue in Latin America, despite their…

In comparison to teachers from Argentina and Uruguay, Brazilian teachers face greater difficulties in teaching biological evolution, due to religion. While Argentina has an official religion set in its constitution, Uruguay and Brazil are considered secular countries. Despite being a self-proclaimed secular country, Brazil tolerates and encourages…

The excess of curriculum content is a well-known problem in high school biology. Some strategies to adjust the amount of content to the available classroom time have been proposed, but none has been widely accepted and applied. Furthermore, biology is frequently presented in high school not as an integrated science, but as a collection of…

Indonesia is a religious country that values local wisdom and customs. Although the characteristics of the Indonesian people may provide novel insight into and distinguished views on the theory of evolution by natural selection, few studies have explored how Indonesians view the theory of biological evolution. Thus, this study aimed to examine the…

Computational thinking is a contemporary science and engineering practice that has been introduced to the US science classrooms due to its emphasis in the "Next Generation Science Standards" (NGSS). However, including computational thinking into science instruction may be challenging. Therefore, for biological evolution (an essential…

Lack of acceptance of biological evolution, despite the overwhelming evidence that supports it, can be very problematic in higher education courses that have a strong biological basis. We investigated acceptance of biological evolution in 344 first-year Life Sciences undergraduate students across five programmes at the University of Roehampton,…

Due to the controversies surrounding the topic of evolution among religious and non-religious people alike, the treatment of biological evolution in education--both teaching and learning--is a potential minefield. The goal of this study was to probe the insights of Israeli stakeholders in education regarding the revision of the Israeli science and…

This article focuses on students' discursive moves and reasoning practices while engaged in a task that requires making explanatory links between sickle cell disease and malaria. Both diseases pertain to key areas of the biology curriculum, namely, genetic variability and natural selection, and are connected to the theory of evolution of living…

Can a teacher aim for students to "believe" evolution without indoctrinating them? Recent discussions of indoctrination in evolution education suggest that such teaching must inevitably indoctrinate but is "warranted" in some cases; while science educators concerned about teaching for "belief" argue that such teaching…