The effectiveness of teaching human evolution to 14-15-year-olds in Slovenia Učinkovitost poučevanja evolucije človeka pri 14-do 15-letnikih v Sloveniji

Abstract

In Slovenia, human evolution is first taught in biology classes to 14–15-year-old students. For many of them, this will be the only contact with this topic at school. The objective was to determine how much knowledge students acquired about human evolution. Data were collected with a questionnaire using a 5-point Likert scale. The participants were 13–14-year-olds who had not yet learned about human evolution (the control group) and 15–16-year-olds who had learned about human evolution one year earlier in biology classes (the experimental group). The results show that students significantly improved their knowledge of human evolution with small to medium effect sizes. Students knew very well that modern humans are the only species of humans today and that they did not live at the same time as dinosaurs. The achievements were low on the following topics: modern humans lived at the same time as Neanderthals and mammoths, and modern humans did not evolve from Neanderthals. To the problematic topics, attention should be paid to teacher education and the primary school curriculum. There were few correlations between the knowledge of human evolution, acceptance of evolution, religiosity, and attitudes toward biology.

Keywords

• knowledge of human evolution
• acceptance of evolution
• religiosity
• attitude towards biology
• primary school