TEACHERS AND TEACHING STRATEGIES: INNOVATIONS AND PROBLEM SOLVING

TEACHERS AND TEACHING STRATEGIES: INNOVATIONS AND PROBLEM SOLVING

If the future of any society can be pinpointed, it is with the teachers who help form the citizens of tomorrow. Sometimes their impact is equal to the parents and sometimes surpasses it by not a small measure. This new book tackles teaching Strategies, Innovations and Problem Solving as the focal points in teaching.

Students’ approaches to the nature of knowledge (known as intellectual development, epistemological development, or cognitive development) have significant impacts on their approach to learning and on their ability to learn throughout and beyond college. College students generally matriculate, and often graduate, with a dualistic (i.e., right or wrong) view of knowledge that is typically incompatible with the paradigms of their chosen field of study. For biology majors faced with addressing evolution in multiple courses and ultimately as the central framework of their studies, their intellectual development may have a profound influence on their understanding of evolution. In this chapter, we report the results of our investigations on the relationships among evolutionary content knowledge, acceptance of evolution, course achievement, and intellectual development (using Perry’s framework) within upper-level evolution courses. We provide examples of the application of Perry’s scheme to controversial content to illustrate different intellectual approaches used by students to cognitively manage this content. Based on prior research and our own experience, we expected to find a positive relationship between intellectual development and achievement or acceptance of evolution in our course, meaning that students with relatively unsophisticated views of knowledge would earn on average lower grades than students with more complex views. We observed levels of intellectual development that were consistent with our expectations for college students, reflecting Perry’s dualism or multiplicity stages. Contrary to our expectations, we found no association between intellectual development (or its change) and either evolutionary content knowledge or acceptance of evolution, and intellectual development level was not correlated to final grade. These results together suggest that learning evolution in our course was not limited by the perspective a student had on the nature of knowledge. We attribute this lack of association between intellectual development and achievement to the pedagogical philosophy and established practices of the course, to expose students to Perry’s model of intellectual development and to encourage students to practice cognition at the contextual relativism stage during various in-class exercises. These practices are described in modest detail. Our findings are used to discuss and illustrate applications of intellectual development theory to support students in their current level of intellectual development. We also discuss mechanisms to facilitate the intellectual development of students in science and engineering courses.