2nd annual MGSE Symposium - Institute for Evolution and ...
2nd annual MGSE Symposium - Institute for Evolution and ...
2nd annual MGSE Symposium - Institute for Evolution and ...
Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
High school students’ attitudes<br />
towards evolutionary theory<br />
Among scientists, evolutionary theory is considered the unifying theory within biology. In<br />
contrast, there is a considerable proportion of the general public – especially in the USA<br />
– that does not accept evolutionary explanations to the origin <strong>and</strong> development of life.<br />
However, attitudes towards evolutionary theory have so far been investigated without<br />
foundation in psychological attitude research <strong>and</strong> the most commonly used instruments<br />
MATE <strong>and</strong> EAS arguably do not to meet the theoretical <strong>and</strong> psychometric st<strong>and</strong>ards of<br />
attitude research. Thus, our main goal is a multidimensional characterization of German<br />
high school students‘ attitudes based on the psychological multicomponent model<br />
of attitudes in order to analyse the degree of positive <strong>and</strong> negative attitudes towards<br />
evolutionary theory <strong>and</strong> the effects of putative influencing factors. For this purpose we<br />
developed <strong>and</strong> validated a closed-ended, multidimensional instrument (α = 0.89) that<br />
was used in a series of pilot studies (n = 842). The results reveal overall positive attitudes<br />
towards evolutionary theory <strong>and</strong> give insight to the effects of attitudes towards science<br />
<strong>and</strong> religion, underst<strong>and</strong>ing of evolution <strong>and</strong> the nature of science as well as ideas about<br />
the relationship between science <strong>and</strong> religion on attitudes towards evolutionary theory.<br />
Combined with an interdisciplinary approach bringing together biological <strong>and</strong> theological<br />
perspectives on teaching <strong>and</strong> learning about evolution <strong>and</strong> creation this in<strong>for</strong>mation<br />
about influencing fators is one of the benefits of our approach that can be used to design<br />
non-indoctrinary teaching strategies <strong>for</strong> evolution education.<br />
In this project – funded by Friedrich Stiftung – we cooperate with the <strong>Institute</strong> <strong>for</strong><br />
Protestant Religious Education at Vienna University.<br />
Christiane Konnemann 1<br />
R. Asshoff 1<br />
M. Hammann 1<br />
1<br />
Centre <strong>for</strong> Didactics of<br />
Biology ,<br />
Westfälische Wilhelms-<br />
University, Münster<br />
ChristianeKonnemann@<br />
uni-muenster.de<br />
27
Change language