Accepting and Understanding Evolution: The Development and Evaluation of Measurement Tools in Evolution Education

Evolution is a key feature of undergraduate biology education: the AmericanAssociation for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has identified evolution as one of the five core concepts of biology, and it is relevant to a wide array of biology-related careers. If biology instructors want students to use evolution to address scientific challenges post-graduation, students need to be able to apply evolutionary principles to real-life situations, and accept that the theory of evolution is the best scientific explanation for the unity and diversity of life on Earth. In order to help students progress on both fronts, biology education researchers need surveys that measure evolution acceptance and assessments that measure students’ ability to apply evolutionary concepts. This dissertation improves the measurement of student understanding and acceptance of evolution by (1) developing a novel Evolutionary Medicine Assessment that measures students’ ability to apply the core principles of Evolutionary Medicine to a variety of health-related scenarios, (2) reevaluating existing measures of student evolution acceptance by using student interviews to assess response process validity, and (3) correcting the validity issues identified on the most widely-used measure of evolution acceptance - the Measure of Acceptance of the Theory of Evolution (MATE) - by developing and validating a revised version of this survey: the MATE 2.0.