A modeling approach to teaching evolutionary biology in high schools

There are numerous empirical reports in the science education literature documenting the difficulty students have in understanding evolution, in particular natural selection. Unfortunately, because of the nature of empirical reports, much detail about the instruction that students in these studies received is seldom provided. In this article we describe the commitments and research that went into the design of a 9-week high school course in evolutionary biology. This course was designed to bring students to an understanding of the practice of evolutionary biology by engaging them in developing, elaborating, and using one of the discipline's most important explanatory models—Darwin's model of natural selection. This article is not an empirical report on student understanding but is instead a description of our view of what constitutes understanding in evolution and of a curriculum designed from this perspective. Examples of student work are used to add richness to the description of the course as well as to illustrate the potential for sophisticated reasoning that exists when students are given the opportunity and conceptual tools to engage in realistic inquiry. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 39: 185–204, 2002