Bridging Emergent Attributes and Darwinian Principles in Teaching Natural Selection

Students often have misconceptions about natural selection as they misuse a direct causal schema to explain the process. Natural selection is in fact an emergent process where random interactions lead to changes in a population. The misconceptions stem from students' lack of emergent schema for natural selection. In order to help students construct a correct emergent schema: 5 inter-level attributes that explain the relationship between the micro-level interactions and macro-level patterns in emergent processes were used to develop learning materials for evolution. This new set of learning materials focusing on emergent attributes were compared to another set of learning materials focusing on Darwinian principles (the more traditional approach in teaching natural selection). In addition, a third set of learning material prompting relational thinking between Darwinian principles and emergent attributes were created. Results suggested that participants with higher prior knowledge of natural selection benefited more from this third relational approach, as they answered deep transfer questions more successfully than participants who received other materials that only focused on either emergent attributes or Darwinian principles.