Monday, August 3, 2009: 4:20 PM
Cinnarron, Albuquerque Convention Center
Background/Question/Methods In the U.S., many students have strong reactions to evolution, and often these reactions (either pro or con) are not based on scientific evidence. Although there are many published labs and research studies on teaching the mechanisms behind evolution (especially natural selection and drift), there is a scarcity of lab material for conveying the evidence that has convinced biologists that modern species arose through descent with modification from common ancestors. A new EvoBeaker(tm) lab from SimBiotic Software, called Evolutionary Evidence, attempts to fill this gap. The Evolutionary Evidence lab focuses on how evolutionary theory predicts nesting of traits between groups of related species, that is, more closely related species will share more traits than those that are more distantly related. In the lab, students also experiment with how nested traits are related to interpretation of fossil discoveries, and are introduced to the importance of transitional fossils. In parallel with developing the lab, we asked which concepts relating to the evidence for evolution are unknown or confusing to students, and how prevalent each of these confusions are.
Results/Conclusions We'll show a demo of the Evolutionary Evidence lab. We'll then present data we collected on student confusions and misconceptions around this topic, and a test we designed based on 42 interviews of biology students from a variety of universities in a major U.S. metropolitan area. Using this test we'll discuss our assessment of student learning gains from the virtual lab, and compare these to learning gains for students who learned about the evidence for evolution through a more traditional lecture format. Finally, we'll present data from a large-scale testing program involving two-dozen introductory and upper-level biology classes from around the U.S.
