STEM Learning and Learning Environments  

Evolving Minds in Early Elementary School: Foundations for a Learning Sequence on Natural Selection Using Stories

Effective Years: 2016-2021

The ECR (Education and Human Resources Core Research) program emphasizes fundamental STEM education research that will generate foundational knowledge in the field. Research shows that world-wide, despite its importance to the life sciences, natural selection remains one of the most widely misunderstood processes in biology. Specifically, studies reveal that scientific misconceptions about natural selection not only persist among high school students and undergraduates who are usual targets of instruction on evolution by natural selection, but, disturbingly, also among many of the teachers trained to teach them. Research further reveals that the origin of many of these misconceptions can be traced to intuitive cognitive biases found at the elementary school level. This project will address this problem by building and testing a learning sequence on natural selection at the early elementary grades before intuitive theoretical misconceptions are likely to have become entrenched. This effort will expand existing infrastructure for research and education currently supported through a university, to school partnership involving elementary educators, curriculum developers, professional development providers, interdisciplinary academic researchers and cognitive development expert consultants. The project focuses on understanding whether the proposed natural selection learning sequence is even viable and beneficial for elementary school students and teachers given children's representational constraints, the development and entrenchment of intuitive cognitive biases and teacher science anxiety. The two central aims will be to: (1) develop the core architecture and explore the feasibility of an expanded elementary school learning sequence on natural selection; (2) examine the educative professional development benefits to elementary school teachers of the developed story-based intervention materials. Six interventions will be conducted through an iteratively designed series of laboratory, afterschool, or classroom empirical studies to explore the viability of mechanistically teaching K-2 children about within- and between-species adaptation by natural selection. Due to the non-binary nature of data that will be generated by the studies, core analyses will be repeated measures ordinal logistic regressions with chi-squared tests for significance. Effect sizes will be indexed by odds ratio. Results from this work will advance scientific knowledge and educational practice by yielding insights about children?s capacities as explanatory thinkers and theory-builders. Materials and products (storybooks, animations and assessment tools) will directly benefit schools, teachers, children and parents in the State of Massachusetts and nationally.

5 Publications Related to This Project: