Following Darwin's footsteps: Evaluating the impact of an activity designed for elementary school students to link historically important evolution key concepts on their understanding of natural selection. Issue 18 (25th August 2021)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Sá‐Pinto, Xana; Pinto, Alexandre; Ribeiro, Joana; Sarmento, Inês; Pessoa, Patrícia; Rodrigues, Leonor R.; Vázquez‐Ben, Lucía; Mavrikaki, Evangelia; Bernardino Lopes, Joaquim
• Is Part Of: Ecology and evolution. Volume 11:Issue 18(2021)
• Page Start: 12236
• Page End: 12250
• Publication Date: 2021-08-25
• Subjects: conceptual fields -- evolution education -- history of science -- teleological thinking; Ecology -- Periodicals; Evolution -- Periodicals; 577.05
• DOI: 10.1002/ece3.7849
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2045-7758

Abstract

Abstract: While several researchers have suggested that evolution should be explored from the initial years of schooling, little information is available on effective resources to enhance elementary school students' level of understanding of evolution by natural selection (LUENS). For the present study, we designed, implemented, and evaluated an educational activity planned for fourth graders (9 to 10 years old) to explore concepts and conceptual fields that were historically important for the discovery of natural selection. Observation field notes and students' productions were used to analyze how the students explored the proposed activity. Additionally, an evaluation framework consisting of a test, the evaluation criteria, and the scoring process was applied in two fourth‐grade classes ( N = 44) to estimate elementary school students' LUENS before and after engaging in the activity. Our results show that our activity allowed students to link the key concepts, resulting in a significant increase of their understanding of natural selection. They also reveal that additional activities and minor fine‐tuning of the present activity are required to further support students' learning about the concept of differential reproduction. Abstract : We hypothesize that exploring conceptual fields historically important for the discovery of natural selection could foster elementary school students' understanding of evolution. We designed, implemented, and evaluated a problem‐based transdisciplinary learning activity to explore this hypothesis. Our results show that this approach effectively promoted elementary school students' understanding of evolution.