Roger Saylor and Michel Ferrari (eds): Epistemology and Science Education: Understanding the Evolution vsntelligent Design Controversy

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Brigandt, Ingo

• Introduction: For decades the creationist movement has threatened the teaching of evolution in the United States, even in public schools. Similar worrisome trends have started in other Western countries. Beyond the major importance of reacting to attempts to undermine the proper teaching of evolutionary biology, the intelligent design issue should remind educators of the need to teach students about the nature of science and the practice of scientific knowledge formation—even in countries without objections to evolution education. While many recent books and edited volumes have addressed why intelligent design is flawed or what makes it bad science, concrete suggestions for how to improve the teaching of evolution at the secondary level have been less common. Epistemology and Science Education: Understanding the Evolution vs. Intelligent Design Controversy, edited by Roger Taylor and Michel Ferrari, makes a timely and welcome contribution to this aim by gathering essays that are theoretically informed by educational psychology, among other fields, and in most cases present recent cognitive psychology studies or some classroom projects. An in my view particularly interesting feature is that several essays— based on different education psychological reasons—converge on the recommendation that beyond the traditional classroom focus on different aspects of microevolution, it is vital to teach macroevolutionary change and human evolution.

• Date created

  2012

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Epistemology
  • Evolution
  • Book Reviews
  • Science Education

• Type of Item

  Review

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R3XK8549B

• License

  © 2012 I. Brigandt et al. This version of this article is open access and can be downloaded and shared. The original author(s) and source must be cited.