Creationism and Evolution Views of Brazilian Teachers and Teachers-to-Be

Abstract

This paper aims at assessing the evolutionist and creationist conceptions of Brazilian teachers. The work is developed within the framework of the European project BIOHEAD-CITIZEN (biology, health and environmental education for better citizenship), which takes into account that scientific knowledge and teachers' attitudes and values can influence the teaching practices. The large questionnaire BIOHEAD-CITIZEN, which was constructed to be applied in 19 countries in Europe, Africa and Middle East countries, was applied, in this study, to six groups of Brazilian teachers: primary school teachers, biology teachers and Portuguese language teachers and corresponding teachers-to-be. For this paper the answers to questions about evolution were used as dependent variables. Descriptive and multivariate analyses were carried out. Biology teachers and biology teachers-to-be gave more importance to the natural selection and the evolution process than the other groups of teachers. Comparing to the BIOHEAD-CITIZEN countries, the total Brazilian sample showed a higher percentage of creationist conceptions, particularly the Brazilian biology teachers and teachers-to-be. As discussed herein, this may not be an obstacle for teaching evolution as they accept both creationist and evolutionist concomitantly.

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