Understanding the concept of deep time is essential for comprehending evolutionary processes, yet research indicates that learners often struggle with grasping vast geological time scales. This study examines the understanding of deep time of first-year university students across 26 European countries and examines its relationship with knowledge about evolution and acceptance of evolution. We assessed students’ estimations of key historical events, including the origin of life, the existence of dinosaurs, and the emergence of humans. The results indicate that while most students correctly sequence these events, many hold substantial misconceptions regarding their absolute time frames and points in time. Statistical analyses reveal a weak correlation between the understanding of deep time and knowledge of evolution, while no significant correlation was found between the understanding of deep time and acceptance of evolution. These findings suggest that deep time is a distinct conceptual domain that requires targeted educational approaches. Additionally, notable differences between country samples highlight the potential influence of curriculum design, cultural factors, and prior education. Given the fundamental role of deep time in understanding evolutionary change, climate change, and biodiversity loss, there is a clear need for effective educational strategies and innovative teaching tools to enhance students’ comprehension.

Students’ interests are important for allocating attentional resources and knowledge acquisition, making the increase of interest a major instructional goal. However, the psychological experiences underlying actual state interest in learning situations are less understood. Addressing this gap, our goal was to examine how students’ state investigative interest and their subjective perceptions of a learning situation unfolded and interrelated throughout the learning episode. We used a micro-longitudinal design with repeated state assessments tracking 251 high school students in Germany at three points during a guided tour on evolution in a natural history museum. State investigative interest was operationalized in three ways, capturing interest in the topic of evolution and in different types of broader investigative activities. Results from bivariate dual latent change score models showed that students’ interest increased throughout the tour, and the learning situation evoked a specific, and relatively stable set of perceived situation characteristics. Interest was systematically linked to perceiving the learning situation as involving tasks (Duty), requiring deep thinking (Intellect), being pleasant (pOsitivity), and enabling social interactions (Sociality). Few time-dependent relations emerged, with interest occasionally predicting subsequent situation perception but not the reverse. This suggests that interest may function as a resource for learning by shaping how students interpret the learning situation. Findings largely replicated across interest operationalizations, integrating approaches from educational and personality psychology. While results should be replicated in different educational contexts, we discuss how they shed light onto the processes underlying state interests in educational settings, along with implications for educators.

Global challenges like biodiversity loss cannot be understood without essential knowledge about evolution. However, evolution is one of the most misunderstood concepts among the general public. Informal learning environments like natural history museums offer great potential for learning about evolution by showing the latest scientific findings in their exhibitions. But to date, there is a lack of evidence about museum visitors' understanding of evolution. Therefore, this study aims to identify which evolutionary key concepts and misconceptions are applied by visitors when asked to explain evolutionary scenarios. Using an online survey, visitors (n = 122) were asked to answer two open-response ACORNS items. Overall, respondents tended to use relatively few key concepts in their responses. Although museum visitors are considered a highly educated group, our surveyed visitors seem to have a poor understanding of evolution. The key concepts and misconceptions identified might help develop future exhibitions and educational programs/activities.

A person's stable and momentary interest have a positive influence on learning. For understanding global challenges related to e.g. biodiversity loss, interest in and knowledge about evolution is of great importance. Museums can make an important contribution to learning about evolution in terms of interest. So far, there is a lack of studies on how exactly museum visits affect students' interest. Against this background, the present study investigated to what extent a guided tour of a NHM can arouse the momentary interest of students. Students (N = 251) aged 15-18 were surveyed by questionnaire before and during a museum tour on evolution. One result is that students could be assigned to theoretically describable groups. Students in the responder group showed an increase in momentary interest, while students in the non-responder group showed a low interest level. Students in the high-level responder group showed a relatively high momentary interest level. The results demonstrate that students were most activated when provided a certain level of open-mindedness. Future studies might investigate why visitors' momentary interest behaves the way we described empirically and how museum guides can respond to students' interests. This includes identifying cues that trigger trajectories of momentary interest during a museum tour.

Students need a clear grasp of evolution to understand biology and the world's current environmental crises. Science teachers are essential in fostering evolution knowledge in their students. Numerous European studies have shown that science teachers possess a broad spectrum of alternative conceptions of evolution, and their acceptance of evolution varies. School curricula increasingly include key concepts of evolution from early grades on. However, studies are limited that examine differences in understandings and acceptance of evolution in different country contexts. This study investigated the knowledge and acceptance of evolution in Swiss science teachers: 1352 pre- and in-service year K-9 teachers were surveyed using two established questionnaires (KAEVO 2.0 and ATEVO). The results showed that as a group, pre-service kindergarten and primary school teachers had a poor grasp of evolution, while pre-and in-service lower secondary school teachers had moderate knowledge. However, we found that knowledge of evolution varied a great deal across the groups and that teachers in all groups had a range of alternative conceptions of evolution. Acceptance of evolution was high for all groups. Given that currently, prospective teachers on some educational tracks do not study evolution at all, our findings have important implications for teacher education in the sciences.

The contribution of school curricula to public understanding and acceptance of evolution is still mostly unknown, due to the scarcity of studies that compare the learning goals present in different curricula. To overcome this lack of data we analysed 19 school curricula (18 European and one from Israel) to study the differences regarding the inclusion of learning goals targeting evolution understanding. We performed a quantitative content analysis using the Framework for the Assessment of school Curricula on the presence of Evolutionary concepts (FACE). For each country/region we analysed what this educational system considered the minimum evolution education a citizen should get. Our results reveal that: (i) the curricula include less than half of the learning goals considered important for scientific literacy in evolution; (ii) the most frequent learning goals address basic knowledge of evolution; (iii) learning goals related with the processes that drive evolution are often not included or rarely mentioned; (iv) evolution is most often not linked to its applications in everyday life. These results highlight the need to rethink evolution education across Europe.

Evolution understanding is often positively connected with magnitudes of evolution acceptance, whereas religiosity mostly interferes negatively. However, comparisons between studies and countries must be treated cautiously due to the diversity of used instruments and samples. This study aims to generate new evidence concerning the interplay of evolution acceptance, evolution understanding, and religious belief by comparing the results of preservice biology teachers, school students, and self-identified creationists answering several acceptance instruments (i.e., ATEVO, GAENE, I-SEA, and MATE) while using the same measurement for understanding and belief. Results of our regression analysis indicate that belief and understanding were significant predictors but often diminished after including the interaction term of belief and understanding. When gender is included in the model, this variable is often significant. The interaction term of belief and understanding was only significant for two instruments in the group of school students. For the creationists, gender appeared as the essential term. While relationship patterns of preservice biology teachers seldom seem to be impacted by the choice of acceptance instruments (at least in correlations and regressions using only belief and understanding), this is not true for our school students and creationists. Our findings indicate that the magnitude of understanding may not mutually be the exclusive factor for (non-)acceptance. Other factors, such as gender or religiosity, might be more prominent in people's attitudes toward (controversial) topics. Our study creates new insights into the interplay of acceptance, understanding, and belief, and we encourage researchers to carefully consider their choice of instruments.

Over the past decades, a large body of research has examined students' magnitudes of evolution acceptance and related measurement issues resulting in questions concerning instruments' validity and operationalization. Until now, several studies investigated validity aspects of often-used evolution acceptance instruments and came to diverging conclusions about instruments' scores comparability. Within the last years, religious identity was identified as a significant predictor for magnitudes of evolution acceptance. However, religious identity can also point to validity issues if aspects of the content under investigation are interpreted differently based on specific religious identity. Additionally, self-identified creationists could serve as a source of validity evidence due to the assumption that creationists should score lower on an evolution acceptance instrument than groups with more scientifically adequate views. Thus, we aim to provide additional validity evidence for often-used evolution acceptance instruments within a European context (i.e., Germany) by comparing two groups of particular interest for research in science education: preservice biology teachers and self-identified creationists. Exploring evidence based on (1) internal structure, (2) relationships with other variables, and (3) test content provides arguments for test interpretations' validity. A total of 286 persons (206 preservice biology teachers and 81 self-identified creationists) participated in a survey comprised of six often-used evolution acceptance measures (i.e., MATE, GAENE, I-SEA, ATEVO, Gallup question, and 100 point questions). Overall, our findings indicate that the six applied instruments demonstrate differences concerning their evidence for sound interpretation. In particular, the DIF and dimensionality analyses lead to the assumption that the GAENE may be multidimensional other than theoretically expected. In general, the multi-item measures were stronger related to each other than to the general public polls. Using an instrument that differentiates between microevolution and macroevolution is advisable for creationist samples or samples with a remarkable share of creationists' views.

EvoDash is an interactive dashboard that displays data collected in the EuroScitizen COST Action (CA17127). Several EuroScitizen working groups have collected data to investigate different research questions associated with evolution outreach, evolution education, public knowledge and acceptance, or scientific literacy.EvoDash is our way to transparently disseminate our research results. On EvoDash, you can actively explore EuroScitizen data based on your own research questions, create graphs and download data.EvoDash contains data from three projects: 1. Evolution Acceptance and Knowledge across Europe, 2. European Curricula Analysis, and 3. Evolution Education Sites. You can navigate to the projects via the menu. Information about each project, data availability, resources, and citations are provided for each project.More details can be found at: www.evodash.eu This publication is based upon work from COST Action EuroScitizen, supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology). COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) is a funding agency for research and innovation networks. Our Actions help connect research initiatives across Europe and enable scientists to grow their ideas by sharing them with their peers. This boosts their research, career and innovation. www.cost.eu

Sleep disorders are risk factors for diseases such as dementia or diabetes, and cause enormous costs. Despite the crucial impacts of sleep on human health, there is little to no research on sleep and health in the field of science education. Although health education is an overarching goal of science education in school, the topic of sleep is rarely addressed. In the related field of medical education, empirical studies shed light on the impact of school projects concerning sleep health but are yet unrecognized by science education research. Systematic reviews demonstrate the effectiveness of school-based sleep education programs for increasing sleep knowledge but show contradicting findings regarding the impact on sleep behaviors. Lacking knowledge about healthy sleep is related to unhealthy sleep behavior. In this perspective article, we prepare the topic of sleep for the field of science education by presenting the state of research concerning sleep education. Using the connection between light pollution and sleep disruption, we present a concept of sleep health literacy in science education, argue for the implementation of sleep health literacy in science education curricula, and describe how the topics of sleep and light can serve as a link between health education and Education for Sustainable Development.

Knowledge about how health communication relates to the needs of the audience may foster two-way communication and audience engagement. Utilizing text mining and cumulative term frequencies (CTF), we investigated the German podcast Coronavirus Update and its subsequent YouTube comments concerning preventive measures during the COVID-19 pandemic. CTF patterns as a measure of relative relevance revealed that preventive measures were partly discussed more frequently in the podcasts (e.g., testing) or the comments (e.g., wearing a mask) and demonstrated ‘discourse hot spots’. The CTF approach enables researchers to identify episodes for further analyses and could help health communicators to foster two-way communication.

Achieving global food security is becoming increasingly challenging and many stakeholders around the world are searching for new ways to reach this demanding goal. Here we demonstrate examples of genetically modified and genome edited plants introduced to the market in different world regions. Transgenic crops are regulated based on the characteristics of the product in many countries including the United States and Canada, while the European Union, India, China and others regulate process-based i.e. on how the product was made. We also present the public perception of state-of-the-art plant gene technologies in different regions of the world in the past 20 years. The results of literature analysis show that the public in Europe and North America is more familiar with the notion of genome editing and genetically modified organisms than the public in other world regions.

Evolutionary understanding is central to biology. It is also an essential prerequisite to understanding and making informed decisions about societal issues such as climate change. Yet, evolution is generally poorly understood by civil society and many misconceptions exist. Citizen science, which has been increasing in popularity as a means to gather new data and promote scientific literacy, is one strategy through which people could learn about evolution. However, despite the potential for citizen science to promote evolution learning opportunities, very few projects implement them. In this paper, we make the case for incorporating evolution education into citizen science, define key learning goals, and suggest opportunities for designing and evaluating projects in order to promote scientific literacy in evolution.

In diesem Teil sind heterogene Ansätze zusammengefasst, die in Zukunft im Unterricht eine Rolle spielen werden oder zumindest sollten. Im schulischen Kontext spielen sie gegenwärtig noch keine große Rolle. Da ein Lehramtsstudium Studierende gerade auch auf zukünftige Herausforderungen vorbereiten und sich keineswegs ausschließlich an der aktuellen Schulwirklichkeit orientieren sollte, werden von uns verschiedene Veranstaltungen aus diesem Bereich angeboten.

The ability to make evidence-based decisions, and hence to reason on questions concerning scientific and societal aspects, is a crucial goal in science education and science communication. However, science denial poses a constant challenge for society and education. Controversial science issues (CSI) encompass scientific knowledge rejected by the public as well as socioscientific issues, i.e., societal issues grounded in science that are frequently applied to science education. Generating evidence-based justifications for claims is central in scientific and informal reasoning. This study aims to describe attitudes and their justifications within the argumentations of a random online sample (N = 398) when reasoning informally on selected CSI. Following a deductive-inductive approach and qualitative content analysis of written open-ended answers, we identified five types of justifications based on a fine-grained category system. The results suggest a topic-specificity of justifications referring to specific scientific data, while justifications appealing to authorities tend to be common across topics. Subjective, and therefore normative, justifications were slightly related to conspiracy ideation and a general rejection of the scientific consensus. The category system could be applied to other CSI topics to help clarify the relation between scientific and informal reasoning in science education and communication.

Background Investigations of evolution knowledge and acceptance and their relation are central to evolution education research. Ambiguous results in this field of study demonstrate a variety of measuring issues, for instance differently theorized constructs, or a lack of standardized methods, especially for cross-country comparisons. In particular, meaningful comparisons across European countries, with their varying cultural backgrounds and education systems, are rare, often include only few countries, and lack standardization. To address these deficits, we conducted a standardized European survey, on 9200 first-year university students in 26 European countries utilizing a validated, comprehensive questionnaire, the “Evolution Education Questionnaire”, to assess evolution acceptance and knowledge, as well as influencing factors on evolution acceptance. Results We found that, despite European countries’ different cultural backgrounds and education systems, European first-year university students generally accept evolution. At the same time, they lack substantial knowledge about it, even if they are enrolled in a biology-related study program. Additionally, we developed a multilevel-model that determines religious faith as the main influencing factor in accepting evolution. According to our model, knowledge about evolution and interest in biological topics also increase acceptance of evolution, but to a much lesser extent than religious faith. The effect of age and sex, as well as the country’s affiliation, students’ denomination, and whether or not a student is enrolled in a biology-related university program, is negligible. Conclusions Our findings indicate that, despite all their differences, most of the European education systems for upper secondary education lead to acceptance of evolution at least in university students. It appears that, at least in this sample, the differences in knowledge between countries reflect neither the extent to which school curricula cover evolutionary biology nor the percentage of biology-related students in the country samples. Future studies should investigate the role of different European school curricula, identify particularly problematic or underrepresented evolutionary concepts in biology education, and analyze the role of religious faith when teaching evolution.