Understanding Evolution

Understanding Evolution is an internationally popular online repository for evolution education. It offers some important innovations for the the field, and also has some conceptual issues that we are working to analyze and highlight in OpenEvo.

Some examples of the problematic conceptual issues within this project:

  • The K-16 Conceptual Framework from Understanding Evolution is strongly gene-centric, with inadequate accounting for behavioral, cognitive, and cultural variation as part of evolutionary explanations.
  • In contrast to their own framework, their database includes at least one lesson on evolutionary change in languges – yet provides no guidance for students or teachers to navigate this interdisciplinary use (see Field Sample: A look at linguistic evolution)

 

Related Lesson Materials