1,721,356 research outputs found
The present state of evolution education
Full text linkEvolution is widely seen as the central, key, unifying framework of biology. Yet many school-aged students and adults understand relatively little of the theory of evolution, for a whole range of reasons ranging from the cognitive difficulty of some of the central concepts to rejection of certain key ideas, whether consciously or unconsciously. Prior to this volume there have been surprisingly few studies of research-based interventions that attempt to use existing knowledge to propose new pedagogies to try to teach evolution to learners more successfully, whether in schools or elsewhere. Successful learning here might be understood as cognitive gains about evolution, as acceptance of evolution or as an increased desire to continue to learn about it. In this chapter we review the existing field of evolution education, discussing the reasons why such understanding is limited, whether for cognitive, socio-cultural or affective reasons (Jones & Reiss, 2007; Rosengren et al., 2012; Kampourakis, 2014; Tracy, Hart & Martens, 2011; Newall, 2017)
Reproduction and Sex Education
Full text linkReproduction is a key characteristic of all living organisms yet school biology often pays little or no attention to reproduction in taxa other than humans and a small number of ‘typical’ flowering plants. In this chapter I argue that there is still much value in a traditional introduction to life cycles and reproduction in a large range of taxa. I go on to consider such issues as the reasons why sex evolved and the diversity of ways in which sex is determined. The second topic addressed in this chapter is sex education, sometimes referred to as sex and relationships education. There is more to sex education than school biology education yet biology teachers can play an important role in sex education. At the same time, many teachers find it challenging to teach sex education well. I consider what makes for an appropriate sex education course, considering such issues as comprehensive sex education versus abstinence education and how school sex education can address questions to do with sexual orientation
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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