When a federal court in 2005 rejected an attempt by the Dover, Pa., school board to introduce intelligent design as an alternative to evolution to explain the development of life on Earth, it sparked a renaissance in involvement among scientists in K-12 science instruction.
Now, some of those teaching programs, studies, and research centers are starting to bear fruit.
The National Science Foundation, the National Academy of Sciences, and other groups have increased research investment on identifying essential concepts for teaching evolution, including creating the , a partnership of Harvard, McGill, and Chapman universities, and launching the first peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the subject, .
Though only one of a long series of skirmishes in a conflict that goes back almost as far as public education in America, the trial, which took place five years ago this month, engaged the professional science community because it put on trial for the first time the scientific validity of intelligent design. The concept posits that the development of humans and other living things was designed by an unnamed guiding force, rather than being the result of natural selection based on random variations.
The school board in Dover argued that there were weaknesses in the theory of evolution, and that students should be exposed to the idea of intelligent design. Judge John E. Jones III of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania flatly rejected that argument, noting that evolution is one of the most strongly supported theories in all of science, backed by broad evidence from across the field. By contrast, he concluded that 鈥渢he overwhelming evidence at trial established that ID [intelligent design] is a religious view, a mere relabeling of creationism, and not a scientific theory,鈥� in his of fact.
From the Archives: View an interactive timeline of historical highlights in the debate over teaching evolution.
The district chose not to appeal the ruling, limiting its legal jurisdiction. But, along with the rejection of efforts in Arkansas and Georgia to undermine evolution鈥檚 validity through disclaimer labels on textbooks and fights over state science standards in Kansas around the same time, the ruling ignited an unprecedented push by scientists and education researchers to become more directly involved in integrating evolution concepts in science classes.
鈥淲hat it has done is made it clearer to the scientific community that they have to come out and make a stand; they can鈥檛 wait in the wings and hope it all blows over,鈥� said E. Margaret Evans, an assistant research scientist in education at the Center for Human Growth and Development at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Classroom Model
One of the instructional-improvement projects is , a program devised by a team of researchers from the Concord, Mass.-based Concord Consortium and Boston College. It pairs computer modeling of natural selection with classroom activities and readings on evolution concepts. In the process of developing the program, the researchers have crafted the first evolution-content assessment for elementary students, based on 11 standards-based learning goals for Massachusetts, according to Camelia Rosca, a senior research associate at the Center for the Study of Testing Evaluation and Education Policy at Boston College.
At Elizabeth G. Lyons Elementary School in Randolph, Mass., one of a handful of states where the program is being tested, 4th graders have finished a unit on plant adaptation, in which they watched the changes to a water-sensitive-plant population as the amount of water available was altered. The class is now extending the computer model to include rabbits and will soon add hawks to illustrate a basic food chain, said lead researcher Paul Horwitz, a senior scientist at Concord.
鈥淲e thought deeply about how to teach concepts to kids this young,鈥� Mr. Horwitz said. 鈥淚 didn鈥檛 want children to 鈥榖elieve鈥� in science; I wanted them to understand it as an explanation for the natural world.鈥�
In addition to using the computer program, the children study a 25-foot-long timeline of species development, play games about food webs, and experiment with Fast Plants庐, which germinate and flower within a month.
Now in the last year of a three-year study sponsored by the NSF, the project鈥檚 with 200 students and 10 teachers in Massachusetts; San Juan, Texas; and North Kansas City, Mo., suggest that students who participate in the program show significantly better understanding than those in a control group of evolution concepts, such as the idea that changes in the environment will prompt changes in a population over time.
The team submitted a proposal for the next phase of the study, dealing with professional development, after finding the students of teachers in Texas and Missouri鈥攚here preprogram teacher training lasted longer鈥攑erformed better than those of teachers in Massachusetts, who had just three days of summer training and 30 hours online.
Teacher Understanding
The findings echo the sense of researchers and evolution experts generally that teacher education and training, rather than school board policy or state standards, will be the key to better teaching of evolution in science courses.
鈥淭here are people who are actively trying to undermine [evolution], but a big part of the challenge is we teach the way we were taught,鈥� said Joshua Rosenau, the programs and policy director at the in Oakland, Calif. 鈥淚n college and teacher-training programs, it鈥檚 important that evolution be taught not just in science education but in basic biology courses that all teachers are required to take.鈥�
In their 2010 book , Pennsylvania State University political scientists Michael Berkman and Eric Plutzer report finding in a 2007 survey that, among a nationally representative sample of 926 high school biology teachers, only 35 percent spent 16 or more hours teaching human and general evolution during the course of the school year. Seventeen percent never covered human evolution at all. Moreover, teachers鈥� instruction strongly correlated to their own understanding of evolution concepts as well as their belief in creationism or intelligent design as a reasonable alternative to evolution.
Such beliefs lead to an 鈥渁voidance and a kind of distancing of the teachers themselves from the material, as in, 鈥榃e have to cover this because the standards require it,鈥欌�� Mr. Berkman said.
And a teacher鈥檚 enthusiasm鈥攐r lack of it鈥攃an make a big difference in how well students learn, said Francis Q. Eberle, the executive director of the National Science Teachers Association. 鈥淏ecause evolution is such a major tenet in science, it鈥檚 really not something that can be danced around,鈥� he said.
Teacher education also has opened up as a new front in the battle over evolution in the classroom, according to Mr. Eberle. The , which promotes creation-based science teaching, recently moved from California to Texas to fight for state accreditation to establish a master鈥檚 degree program in science education. Also, Louisiana has passed an protecting teachers who supplement their standard science textbooks with other materials; a state committee explicitly rejected a move to bar creationist or intelligent design materials from those supplements.
鈥淚f you take this term of 鈥榓cademic freedom鈥� more broadly, does it mean a teacher can teach anything?鈥� Mr. Eberle asked. 鈥淚t鈥檚 been narrowly applied to evolution, and I think it鈥檚 another term to accomplish the same goal鈥� to undermine the scientific validity of evolution.
