“It is not the CO2 itself, it’s the imbalance!”: Conceptual reconstruction of the carbon cycle in global warming

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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.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationAuthenticity in Biology Education : Benefits and Challenges; A selection of papers presented at the VIII th conference of European Researchers in Didactics of Biology (ERIDOB) 13-17 July 2010 University of Minho, Braga, Portugal
EditorsAnat Yarden, Graça S Carvalho
Number of pages14
Place of PublicationBraga
PublisherCIEC, Universidade do Minho
Publication date2011
Pages339-352
ISBN (print)978-972-8952-19-8
Publication statusPublished - 2011