Changes in acceptance of evolution in a college-level general education course

Abstract

Evolutionary theory is central to the biological sciences, and to critical aspects of everyday life, and yet a significant proportion of Americans reject evolution. Our study sets out to examine the role of a second year college general education course in affecting students’ acceptance of evolution. We report three years of data using the Measure of Acceptance of the Theory of Evolution (MATE) instrument, and show that students make small and sometimes statistically significant gains in acceptance over the course of a semester. We found no evidence that including evolution topics in coursework caused an overall decrease in acceptance of evolution. We suggest that increased coursework on evolution topics, especially using interactive teaching methods, may increase acceptance of evolution.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 11 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.