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Prevalence Of Teleological And Lamarckian Misconceptions Of Natural Selection Among College Students, Bryce T. Battisti
Prevalence Of Teleological And Lamarckian Misconceptions Of Natural Selection Among College Students, Bryce T. Battisti
Theses and Dissertations
Science teachers and researchers note that students must correctly understand the role of natural selection in evolution to make sense of biology. The level of understanding of natural selection can be assessed using the Conceptual Inventory of Natural Selection (CINS) which is a 20-item multiple-choice test that incorporates student misconceptions as distractors. In the present study, Item Response Theory (IRT) was used to analyze the occurance of misconceptions on the CINS among 1192 students in an introductory non-majors biology course. The four most difficult topics in the CINS are: (a) how change occurs in a population; (b) origin of variation; …