Abstract
<p style="text-align: justify;">Low acceptance of evolution remains an obstacle to quality biology instruction. We develop and utilize a novel assessment which measures emotional experience in light of real-world evolution education scenarios. We presented 296 science teachers 4 pro-evolution and 8 anti-evolution scenarios and asked them to rate their levels of joy, anger, sadness, fear, disgust, shame, and guilt elicited by that scenario on an ordinal 5-point scale. We used exploratory factor analysis to extract the most important dimensions in the teachers’ responses, Rasch analysis to explore the validity of the extracted subscales, and stepwise regression to find the most important factors driving emotional dispositions. We extracted 3 factors: (1) pro-evolution experience (positive emotions on pro-evolution and negative emotions on anti-evolution scenarios), (2) anti-evolution experience (negative emotions on pro-evolution and positive emotions on anti-evolution scenarios), and (2) feelings of regret over anti-evolution scenarios (shame and guilt on anti-evolution scenarios). Acceptance of evolution facts and a non-theistic religious orientation were positively related to pro-evolution experience. Anti-evolution experience was predicted by lack of microevolution acceptance and lack of teacher preparation. Feelings of regret around anti-evolution scenarios were driven by acceptance of evolution facts and lower levels of teacher preparation. This work advances our understanding of how teachers relate affectively to the theory of evolution and offers empirical insight into ways to improve dispositions about evolution.</p>
Highlights
Despite the prevalence of anti-evolution views in the United States (US), US education policy emphasizes the importance of teaching evolution
In order to explore in a holistic way how teachers react emotionally to issues related to evolution education, we presented the teachers with both pro-evolution (4 scenarios; Table 1) and anti-evolution (8 scenarios; Table 1) scenarios, and asked each teacher to rate their level of joy, anger, sadness, fear, disgust, shame, and guilt on a 5-level ordinal scale: none at all (0), a little (1), a moderate amount (2), a lot (3), and a great deal (4)
The development of the MATE (Rutledge & Warden, 1999) was an important step commencing the journey toward understanding how both students and teachers relate to the theory of evolution on an emotional level
Summary
Despite the prevalence of anti-evolution views in the United States (US), US education policy emphasizes the importance of teaching evolution. Policy discussions related to science education have reached an overwhelming consensus that it is essential to help students understand evolution, biology teachers often do not rise to this task, especially in localities with persistent Christian (Bowman, 2008) and Islamic (Fouad, 2018) fundamentalism. Teachers in these localities who wish to teach evolution often do not feel prepared to face opposition from parents and school administrators, while others may not feel confident in their knowledge and ability to teach evolution in the first place (Romine et al, 2014). We see that the goal of understanding and improving the quality of evolution pedagogy that students receive is not a simple matter, but rather a problem rooted in complex emotional experiences rising from lack of community support (Cleaves & Toplis, 2007), religion (Trani, 2004), and misunderstandings about evolution (Berkman et al, 2008)
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