Is it possible to teach biology without mentioning evolution? The answer is yes, but it is not possible for students to understand biology without the evolutionary context on which the meaning and intellectual value of biological concepts depend. Meaningful learning of evolution requires (1) that the students incorporate new knowledge into a…

Understanding the nature of science has long been a focus of science education reform efforts, including the Next Generation of Science Standards. Students' views about the process of how scientific knowledge is acquired has been shown to affect their ability to learn scientific concepts. Integrating the nature of science into science lesson plans…

Evolution is fundamental to biology and scientific literacy, but teaching high school evolution is often difficult. Evolution teachers face several challenges including limited content knowledge, personal conflicts with evolution, expectations of resistance, concerns about students' conflicts with religion, and curricular constraints. Evolution…

Publication of the "Next Generation Science Standards" will be just short of two decades since publication of the "National Science Education Standards" (NRC 1996). In that time, biology and science education communities have advanced, and the new standards will reflect that progress (NRC 1999, 2007, 2009; Kress and Barrett…

Using the life sciences, this article first reviews essential features of the "NRC Framework for K-12 Science Education" that provided a foundation for the new standards. Second, the article describes the important features of life science standards for elementary, middle, and high school levels. Special attention is paid to the teaching…

Stan Metzenberg offers a critical analysis of the draft "Massachusetts Science and Technology/Engineering Standards," which are for pre-Kindergarten to Grade 8 and introductory high school courses. Metzenberg claims that the document reveals significant, unacceptable gaps in science content, as well as some notable errors and…

Although the core work of science is oriented toward constructing, revising, applying, and defending models of the natural world, models appear only rarely in school science, and usually only as illustrations, rather than theory building tools. We describe the rationale and structure for a learning progression to understand the development of…

In the United States, there is a national agenda to increase the number of qualified science, technology, engineering, and maths (STEM) professionals and a movement to promote science literacy among the general public. This project explores the association between formal human evolutionary biology education (HEB) and high school science class…

Presents an outline of lectures given on this topic to British secondary students. Man's various ideas about the origin of life are included in three categories: those that consider life to have been created by a Divine Being; those that consider life to have developed from non-living matter; and those that consider life to be eternal. (MLH)

Summarizes recent findings that help in understanding how evolution has brought about the diversity of plant life that presently exists. Discusses basic concepts of evolution, diversity and classification, the three-line hypothesis of plant evolution, the origin of fungi, and the geologic time table. Included are 31 references. (CW)

Demonstrates the magnitude of an extinction event by using a simulation to illustrate the massive nature of the loss of a family and the number of species that perish to achieve that result. (RT)

Describes current experiments that help to explain chemical processes which probably existed prior to the first living cells. Some experiments suggest that a significant portion of a major metabolic pathway, the Krebs cycle, may have developed in the earth's primitive atmosphere to be later incorporated into living organisms. (JR)

Outlines the proteinoid theory of the origin of life and examines competing or alternative concepts in the light of a sequential experimental model. (JR)

Reports the current situation in a number of states regarding the controversy of teaching evolution and creatonist theories in science classes. (JR)

This laboratory exercise integrates the topics of cell structure, classification of living organisms, and evolution. It is suitable for secondary or college biology courses and was used in an interdisciplinary science course for nonscience majors. (BB)