Brazilian teachers’ conceptions about creationism and evolution

• Author(s): Caldeira, Ana Maria de Andrade ; Araújo, Elaine Sandra Nicolini Nabuco de ; Carvalho, Graça Simões de
• Date: 2011
• Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/1822/17187
• Origin: RepositóriUM - Universidade do Minho
• Subject(s): Teaching biology; Biological evolution; Creationism; Brazilian teachers
• Document Type: Part of book or chapter of book
• Language: English

Description

The identification of teachers’ conceptions about evolution is important because it enables understanding, for example, how they cope with issues related to the creationism versus evolution conflict inside the classroom. This work was developed within the framework of the European project BIOHEAD-CITIZEN, which considers that scientific knowledge and teachers’ attitudes and values can influence teaching practices. A questionnaire was designed for 19 countries in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. This current paper extends the BIOHEAD-CITIZEN project to a South American country, Brazil, aiming to assess the evolutionist and creationist conceptions of six groups of in-service and future teachers. The questions on evolution were worked out as dependent variables and multivariate analysis was carried out. The results agree with previous results obtained from 12 other countries, in that in-service and future biology teachers give more importance to natural selection and the evolutionary process than other groups of teachers. Compared with those countries, however, the total Brazilian sample shows a higher percentage of creationist conceptions, particularly for Brazilian biology teachers and future teachers. As discussed herein, this may not be an obstacle to teaching evolution as these teachers accept both creationism and evolutionism concomitantly.