The American Biology Teacher

ABSTRACT

What knowledge do you need to be an effective instructor? One key type of knowledge is pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), which includes awareness of how students are likely to think about a topic and where they will struggle as they learn that topic. We propose PCK as a valuable framework for reflecting on your own knowledge for teaching topics in evolution. We have created a searchable file that uses PCK as a framework to organize over 400 peer-reviewed papers from 40+ journals to give you better access to relevant resources for teaching evolution to undergraduates and advanced high school students. None of us have time to read 400 papers to inform our teaching, so we provide tips to maximize your use of this collective knowledge in the time you have available. We have written these to be useful to instructors across career stages.

Key Words: Evolution education; undergraduate; teaching evolution; PCK; pedagogical content knowledge; student thinking; instructional strategies; teaching strategies; assessment; learning objectives.

Take a moment to reflect on the knowledge that you use when you teach evolutionary topics. Most obviously, you use knowledge of the discipline of evolutionary biology. You also use pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). PCK combines content knowledge of a specific topic with knowledge about how students will interact with that topic as they learn (Magnussen et al., 1999; Park & Oliver, 2008; Gess-Newsome, 2015). Most often we build PCK through teaching experience, but could we also benefit from the published work of veteran evolution instructors and education researchers? We think so. Our aim in this article is to guide you to recognize the PCK that you may already have and to encourage you to capitalize on collective knowledge to continue to build PCK for teaching topics in evolution.

You have been using and building PCK since you started learning to teach. For example, imagine you pose this question to your students and they write down their thoughts: “A species of fish lacks fins. How would biologists explain how a species of fish without fins evolved from an ancestral fish species with fins?”

(Nehm et al., 2012). Now reflect: What kinds of answers do you
expect from your students? Could you predict a difficulty your stu-
dents would have with this question? Maybe you predicted that
undergraduates would have a much harder time answering this
question accurately than one about how traits become common
through natural selection (Nehm & Ha, 2011). Or maybe you
thought about how students would be likely to explain that fins
evolved away because the fish didn’t “need” them anymore (Bishop
& Anderson, 1990). If so, you were relying on PCK for teaching
natural selection.

PCK is central to many parts of teaching. We use PCK when we decide what learning objectives for a topic are important and reasonable for students to achieve and what objectives are less crucial and can be cut if we run out of time. We employ PCK when predicting what makes a topic particularly hard to learn and where students might get stuck. During instruction we use PCK when drawing on specific analogies, visual representations, or activities that we know are useful in helping students construct accurate understandings. Additionally, we rely on PCK when writing in-class questions and exam questions that reveal what students actually know about a topic. Importantly, what is challenging about learning (and therefore teaching) one topic is often entirely different than what is challenging about learning the next topic, so we depend on distinct PCK for each topic we teach.

As a result, the body of PCK we need as evolution instructors is staggering! What if we could supplement our personal PCK by drawing on the collective knowledge others have already built through experience and research? This knowledge can be referred to as “ collective PCK.” Collective PCK is generated by researchers and instructors and made publicly available for others. We have taken steps to make collective PCK in peer-reviewed literature more readily available. We hope this makes it more useful to college and AP Biology instructors at all career stages.

We created a searchable file that organizes over 400 peer-reviewed papers about undergraduate and high school evolution instruction from over 40 different journals (see https://www.life scied.org/doi/suppl/10.1187/cbe.17-08-0190). You can read more

The American Biology Teacher, Vol. 81, No. 2, pp. 133–136, ISSN 0002-7685, electronic ISSN 1938-4211. © 2019 National Association of Biology Teachers. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/abt.2019.81.2.133.