University students are assumed to have a certain level of knowledge and acceptance of evolutionary theory. But a national study, coordinated by the professor at the University of Vigo (CIM-UVigo) Emilio Rolán, has just found that this is not always the case. After evaluating third-year students in Biology, Chemistry, History and English Philology from ten Spanish universities, the experts maintain that, while the level of acceptance is high, “the level of knowledge is very low”. This, for the professor at the Department of Biochemistry, Genetics and Immunology at UVigo and researcher at the Marine Research Center, “represents the confirmation of a failure in the entire Spanish educational system, from primary to university education and suggests that it is not solved simply by having more or fewer hours in a specific subject, but that all subjects should core part of their content with an evolutionary approach”.
The professor from the Faculty of Biology in Vigo piloted this study by analyzing the situation on ten campuses and, as he explains, the data obtained demonstrate improvements in understanding in those universities where more of the content deals with evolution. “The theory of evolution is a key theoretical aspect in our degree, just as it is in the scientific and philosophical culture of our societies, with an absolute impact on the way we see and interpret the modern world”. However, he acknowledges, “we are not able to transmit and teach this to our students”, complains Rolán and, without the knowledge base that the theory of evolution implies, he points out “it would be difficult to understand what a genome is or how it is that all living beings are more or less distant relatives”. This is why the professors of the subject of Evolution in the first year of Biology “we get frustrated every year when we see such a low level of understanding of basic aspects of this theory among our students”.
A study born from experience
Emilio Rolán, in addition to his background as a professor at the Faculty of Biology, has developed teaching experiences with ESO students at the IES República Oriental de Uruguai in Vigo). Through these projects, it was possible to establish “that evolution is not part of the mandatory knowledge taught in pre-university education at any level, and this is a very serious problem that predisposes students to enter university without any robust knowledge about said theory”.
From this experience, and together with other teachers who teach the subject of evolution, they decided to get down to work to analyze the situation and find a solution. They began by “formally studying the degree of evolutionary illiteracy that exists among the elite of Spanish students, that is, at the university level.” What they sought was to find the problem and denounce it to society in order to try to reverse the situation.
Some expected results, others not so much
To begin the project, the teachers designed a study that involved selecting four degrees (Biology, Chemistry, History and English Philology) taught in almost all Spanish universities and conducting surveys of their students through GoogleForm. Through the Spanish Society of Evolutionary Biology, they requested the collaboration of other teachers willing to travel to a 3rd year class in each of these four degrees in order to contact the students and propose the survey to them. In the end, there were ten universities involved and “we also studied a sample of teachers from two universities”.
The results, reports Professor Emilio Rolán, “were as expected in some subjects and not so expected in others”. On the one hand, he explains that the level of acceptance of evolutionary theory among Spanish university students was high. In fact, the few studies that exist in Europe place Spanish students, along with German students, among those with the highest acceptance. “This was expected, given that already in the 1990s it was suggested that acceptance problems did not affect European countries”, points out the professor. On the contrary, the level of knowledge turned out to be low. While Biology achieved “barely a passing grade”, the rest of the degrees “failed, although with similar values”. According to Rolán, this means that “studying three years of Biology does not give students a sufficiently robust framework to excel in basic aspects of a key theory in their field. This is neither expected nor desired”.
On the other hand, the results showed that students with a greater interest in religious subjects “presented a moderate reduction of about 8% in their level of acceptance”, when in the US it is around 20%. Finally, the study also found similar, but not identical, results in the ten participating universities. The differences could be explained, according to Rolán, in part, by the level of evolutionary material included in their study plans. “I don’t know if this was expected but, of course, it is very desirable, as it suggests that what we teach has an impact on their knowledge”.
What to do?
Faced with this situation, the UVigo professor urges decisions to be made. “The solution is complex and cannot be solved from one year to the next,” he says, but he also advocates certain measures such as a “radical change” in the biology subject taught from primary to secondary school. “At the moment there is an excess of information and unimportant material and, nevertheless, the core knowledge that allows a minimum understanding of evolution is not available,” Rolán points out.
Furthermore, the results of the study also point out that teachers, both in the previous stage and in the university, “have a very poor knowledge of the evolution”. In his opinion, “we should start by reworking the curricula of Primary, Secondary and Baccalaureate and, then, the change would continue on its own” and he calls “on any politician with influence to bring this demand to the relevant authorities to promote any change”.
Source: DUVI
