In primary school, children don't learn about human evolution in biology until the ninth grade, while in the curriculum for biology, there is just one goal that is directly connected with human evolution. In the theoretic part, we connected knowledge of human evolution and relation to the evolution theory with learning goals that are in the primary school curriculum of subjects: biology, natural science, nature studies, natural science and technology, history, and geography. Children learn about human evolution in history class before they learn it in biology class. It is therefore important that teachers make a lot of connections between different subjects to help children see the bigger picture and the importance of the subject for their life. We also analyzed different textbooks of biology, history, and geography. We presented problems that we encounter while teaching human evolution, such as misconceptions about the subject, the omission of the subject by teachers, and the conflict between science and religions about the theory of evolution.
In the empirical part, we made studies with children from two primary schools and one high school. We used quantitative research. We made and used an online survey which consisted of a part where we tested their knowledge and a part where they shared their opinion on human evolution. With our research, we tried to figure out how good is the knowledge of students of the 8th and 9th grades of primary school, and the 1st grade of high school. Together there were 205 participants. Students showed their knowledge is not adequate, as their average success when answering the questions was 59,1 %. We found out that high school students have better knowledge than primary school students after they had lessons of human evolution in the 9th grade.
We were interested if students want to know more about evolution and if they think we should talk about it more in school. We found out that the majority of them do want that and that they think that human evolution is interesting. Interest in human evolution depended on gender. Boys have better knowledge on the subject than girls and there were more girls that wanted to participate in online research. We made proposals for teaching human evolution in a deeper and more interesting way. We introduced the idea of visiting museums, board games, etc. Our end products are two teaching preparations, one of them to prevent misconceptions, and the second one that includes the connection of biology with history and geography.
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