Building High School Students' Understanding of Evolution

培养高中生对进化论的理解

• 批准号: 1418136
• 负责人: Louisa Stark
• 金额: $ 300万
• 依托单位: University of Utah
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2014
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2014-09-01 至 2019-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1418136&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Building; Students; Understanding; Evolution

Understanding evolution is fundamental to understanding contemporary biology, but many students do not understand the core ideas of evolutionary theory. Students misinterpret phylogenetic trees, they misunderstand fundamental concepts of common ancestry, and they have a poor grasp of evolutionary time. This project will address widespread misunderstandings related to evolution by developing and testing a new high school curriculum unit and assessment measures focusing on biological evolution. The University of Utah Genetic Science Learning Center and the American Association for the Advancement of Science are collaborating to develop a curriculum unit that models integration of the three dimensions of the Next Generation Science Standards: disciplinary core ideas, science practices, and crosscutting concepts. The new curriculum will also integrate Common Core Mathematics standards on reasoning abstractly and quantitatively, and an English Language Arts standard for writing arguments focused on discipline-specific content. This project builds on a previously funded NSF project that developed and tested six prototype lessons on natural selection. In classroom enactments the lessons showed preliminary promise for significantly increasing student understanding of natural selection and decreasing their misconceptions about natural selection and statistics.This research and development project is based on the hypothesis that students will better understand the disciplinary core ideas about biological evolution when curriculum materials and instruction have certain identified features and when professional development experiences prepare teachers to use those materials and instructional practices. The research questions and research plan are designed to test this hypothesis using a randomized controlled trial design that allows for iterative rounds of refinement. The study will engage 20 teachers of grades 9-10 biology from across the U.S. who teach a diversity of students. To conduct the research, the project will develop measures of student understanding and a measure of teacher content knowledge. A measure of evidence-based evolution argumentation will also be developed for use with teachers and students.

理解进化论是理解当代生物学的基础，但许多学生不理解进化论的核心思想。 学生们误解了系统发育树，他们误解了共同祖先的基本概念，他们对进化时间的把握也很差。 该项目将通过开发和测试一个新的高中课程单元和评估措施来解决与进化有关的广泛误解，重点是生物进化。 犹他州大学遗传科学学习中心和美国科学促进会正在合作开发一个课程单元，该单元模拟了下一代科学标准的三个维度的整合：学科核心思想，科学实践和交叉概念。 新课程还将整合关于推理抽象和定量的共同核心数学标准，以及专注于学科特定内容的英语语言艺术写作标准。 该项目建立在以前资助的NSF项目的基础上，该项目开发并测试了六个自然选择的原型课程。 在课堂教学中，这些课程初步显示出了显著提高学生对自然选择的理解和减少他们对自然选择和统计学的误解的希望。这项研究和发展项目是基于这样一个假设，即当课程材料和教学具有某些确定的特征时，当专业发展经验准备好时，学生将更好地理解关于生物进化的学科核心思想。教师使用这些材料和教学实践。 研究问题和研究计划旨在使用随机对照试验设计来测试这一假设，该设计允许迭代优化。 这项研究将吸引来自美国各地的20名9-10年级生物学教师，他们教授各种各样的学生。 为了进行研究，该项目将制定学生理解的措施和教师内容知识的措施。 还将制定一项以证据为基础的进化论证措施，供教师和学生使用。