Fossil materials with photographs, which are evidence of evolution from the Paleozoic to the Cenozoic Era, are published in science textbooks for lower secondary school first graders. However, there is no explanation of “how all living things have evolved”; only the results of evolution are enumerated. On the other hand, there are many misunderstandings concerning “evolution”, and many previous studies have pointed out the misconceptions that are persistently retained. Therefore, the purpose of this paper was to examine to what extent the evolutionary concepts of lower secondary school students were formed by the lesson we developed. Specifically, we set up “essential questions” on evolution every hour in the lesson, and we prepared “performance tasks” to be expressed via “pictures” and “sentences” as the summative assessment. Furthermore, before and after the students created the performance tasks, we gave them opportunities to rethink and revise them through active learning. In other words, the elements of formative assessment such as mutual peer assessment were added to the teaching and learning process. Our analysis based on the performance tasks and the results of our questionnaire survey showed a certain effectiveness in fostering understanding of the evolutionary concepts in the lower secondary school students.
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