JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN SCIENCE TEACHING VOL. 29, NO. 10, P. 1019 (1992)

Editorial

Evolution Education: An Area of Needed Research

Included in the March 1992 issue of JRST is a call for papers for a special issue on evolution education. Considering the central role played by evolution in the life sci- ences, it is curious that relatively little research has been done on evolution education. The intellectual revolution brought about by Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species in 1859 is considered by many scientists and others to be the most important of all the advances in scientific thought. Of course some physicists, chemists, geologists, and others might disagree on that ranking.

Leading scientific and science education organizations such as The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), The National Research Council (NRC), and The National Association of Biology Teachers (NABT) identify evolution as the organizing framework for the life sciences. The relatively few studies that we have done in evolution education indicate that students have considerable difficulty understanding the theory and its implications. Understanding how students grapple with the existence and mechanisms of the evolution of life should be a goal as central to science (biology) education as Darwinian evolutionary theory is to biology itself. Prior knowledge, attitudes and beliefs, teaching and learning methods, nature of the curricu- lum, and other factors that are likely to have some effect on student learning of evolution should be given more attention by science education researchers.

In recent years I have read, or in some cases re-read, Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle, The Origin of Species, The Descent of Man, most of Stephen J. Gould’s popular works on Darwin and the evolution, including Wonderful Life, and Ernst Mayr’s Toward A New Philosophy of Biology and One Long Argument. These plus a few other works and many interesting discussions with my science education col- leagues at LSU have helped me (a stodgy, physics-type) to better understand the importance of evolution education in the overall scheme of science education. I hope that this brief editorial and the upcoming special issue of JRST focus more attention on the importance of evolution education and the need to learn more about how students come to understand this unifying framework in biology.

RON GOOD Editor

0 1992 by the National Association for Research in Science Teaching Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. CCC 0022-43081921 1001019-01