According to research, Slovenian pupils have good knowledge of natural science and biology, but less about the human evolution. Recently, this has caused intensified reasearches in the topic. Teachers are mainly left to themselves, since the official curriculum contains only one goal pertaining to human evolution. Besides, teachers as well as students can face significant internal conflicts when dealing with the topic of human evolution. The aim of our study was to test the knowledge of pupils in the Slovenian Carinthia region, and figure out if the pupils at the end of primary education have sufficient knowledge of human evolution and how this knowledge correlates with sex, age and specific school they are attending. Additionally we wanted to find out various misconceptions pupils might have with regards to human evolution. Two hundred sixty-nine pupils of 8th and 9th grade of five primary schools in the Carinthia region were included in our study. We found out that Carinthian pupils have insufficient knowledge of human evolution, since the average test score was 57,94%. 9th grade pupils have more knowledge than 8th graders, while sex had minimal effect on the outcome. We detected small differences in knowledge between pupils of different schools; those from school number 4 had more knowledge than pupils of other schools which showed insignificant differences in test. The typical misconception which we observed in all schools included in the study was that the modern human evolved from Homo neanderthalensis. The pupils also showed poor knowledge about where the modern humans had evolved.
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