Deena Skolnick Weisberg - US grants

General Audience Summary

The purpose of this project is to gain a fuller picture of what people in the United States know about the theory of evolution, to what extent they accept this theory, and what explains their beliefs and their degree of acceptance. The project thus has the potential to make a huge impact on important social issues, such as conflicts over biology education. Understanding the nature and source of resistance to evolutionary biology is critical for changing not only public dialogue, but also the way in which public dialogue is framed. The PIs are committed to disseminating the findings of this project so that they will reach those involved in science policy and in formal and informal science education. They will do so by contributing materials to and reviewing materials for the Understanding Evolution project at the University of California Museum of Paleontology (which provides lesson plans and other resources to teachers), giving public lectures, leading professional development workshops for teachers, and writing articles for the policy journal Science Progress. The PIs will also involve at least four undergraduate research assistants from Penn's diverse student body in every stage of the project.

Technical Summary

The PIs propose a systematic investigation of the public's knowledge about and attitudes towards evolution. This project will approach the question of the public's understanding and acceptance of evolution by first conducting a series of preliminary surveys focusing on what people know about various aspects of the theory of evolution, the extent to which they accept these aspects, and any demographic factors that systematically impact their understanding and acceptance. These surveys will ask about the extent to which they appreciate descent with modification, their ability to reason about phylogenetic relationships, and whether they preferentially accept adaptive explanations. The results of these surveys will then be used to construct a single questionnaire, which will be administered to a demographically representative panel of 1,000 U.S. citizens. The PIs will additionally conducted targeted interviews with individuals who accept evolution without understanding it, as well as individuals who do not accept evolution, to gain a deeper understanding of sources of misconceptions about evolution. The PIs will investigate several hypotheses about why Americans resist accepting evolution. Using the same procedure indicated, the PIs will develop a second survey instrument, which will be administered to a second demographically balanced panel of Americans. Together, the results of these two surveys will produce the most highly refined data about Americans' views on evolution that have ever been collected.

One of the most important processes in scientific thinking is belief revision: the ability to change an initial hypothesis in light of new evidence. In order to do this, children must be able to do two things. First, they must be able to reason about how the world works so that they can understand the causal systems they encounter, such as what causes earthquakes. Second, children must be able to think about their own knowledge and the process of learning so that they will know whether and how to change their beliefs about causal systems. This project seeks to (1) discover how the capacity for belief revision develops in the early elementary-school years, (2) explore how this capacity relates to children's awareness of their own learning, and (3) describe how both of these processes relate to children's interactions with museum exhibits. The research team involves developmental laboratories at the University of Pennsylvania and Brown University and informal STEM learning partners at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia and the Providence Children's Museum. The project is funded by the EHR Core Research (ECR) program which funds fundamental research that seeks to understand, build theory to explain, and suggest interventions (and innovations) to address persistent challenges in STEM interest, education, learning, and participation.

The project involves two lines of research, which study children's responses to different kinds of science puzzles. The first series of experiments are lab-based and vary the information that children observe and the types of exploratory actions that they can take. Children are also interviewed to find out how they think about science and learning. This design is intended to determine how different sets of evidence and different exploratory actions affect children's learning. It also addresses how children's abilities for belief revision may differ between abstract and contextualized causal systems. This line of work additionally investigates when children gain the capacity to revise their beliefs explicitly in the face of counterevidence, linking their scientific thinking capacities to their developing metacognitive abilities. The second series of experiments observes and records children's explorations of and interactions in museum exhibits. Parents and children are interviewed and asked to comment on video clips of their museum explorations. This allows the researchers to examine how naturally occurring behavior in informal learning settings affects children's learning and views about learning. Findings can illuminate how children learn to integrate evidence with their beliefs, which can inform educational policies and practices around the teaching of science. These studies can also advance researchers and museum practitioners' understanding of how museum environments foster children's growth into healthy, independent thinkers and how to support caregivers' efforts to assist children's learning.