Abstract
The purpose of this study was to ascertain the status of scientific evolutionary concept formation among lower secondary school students by using two learning plans. There is much misunderstanding concerning “biological evolution”; for example, many misconceptions, such as the “inheritance of acquired characteristics” (which is repeatedly mentioned), have been pointed out in many previous studies. In this study, we focused on the idea that “Natural selection explains how living things evolve” to enable lower secondary school students to understand the mechanism of biological evolution. To this end, three objectives, Adaptation, Variation, and Selection, were incorporated into the learning goal. According to the learning goal, we developed two learning plans using the theory of “backward design,” including both 1st year and 2nd year students, and covering both “biology and geology.” In addition, as the central task of the learning plan for biology, we prepared a “performance task” to infer the evolutionary hypothesis based on the theory of natural selection. In conclusion, through analyzing the performance assessment and the questionnaire survey comparing “biology and geology,” we could explain a part of the process of scientific evolutionary concept formation among lower secondary school students.
