Enablers of Doubt

The Three Pillars of Creationism

One way to understand how pedagogy contributes to a political clash is to see how teachers’ own behaviors and beliefs resonate with the political strategies of the pro- and anti-evolution forces. Thus, our analytic framework is informed by Eugenie Scott’s analysis of the anti-evolution movement and its “three pillars of creationism” (2009). The first pillar is that the science of evolution is controversial. The second pillar is that, to be fair, “both sides” must be taught. The third pillar of anti-evolutionism is that religion and science are incompatible.

Data and Methods

Our data come from two sources. The views and perspectives of practicing teachers come from our 2007 National Survey of High School Biology Teachers, a nationally representative, probability sample of 926 teachers from 49 states. The survey had a response rate of 50 percent (AAPOR standard RR4; see Berkman and Plutzer 2010, appendix A5.1 for details). Teachers completed a six-page questionnaire (most in pencil-paper form, but some completed an online version). Teachers answered questions about their classroom practices when teaching evolution, their personal attitudes and values toward evolution and creationism, and what they perceived as classroom challenges and potential conflicts. In addition to forced choice questions, we also invited teachers to add comments, suggestions, anecdotes, or anything else they wished to tell us. A total of 325 teachers took advantage of this, typically writing a short paragraph.

The second source is the transcription of a series of focus groups that we conducted on four campuses in Pennsylvania in 2013. One was a large research university, a second was one of the fourteen medium-sized (comprehensive) “state owned” universities that produce a majority of Pennsylvania’s certified teachers, the third was a Catholic four-year college with a large science education program, and the fourth was a historically black university that did not train secondary science teachers, but included a science methods course for students seeking certification in elementary education. All four focus groups were conducted by the authors of this article. The sessions lasted 50 to 65 minutes and were recorded and professionally transcribed. The four institutions do not compose a probability sample, and are not intended to be representative of institutions nationally or even of teacher colleges within Pennsylvania. Rather, they were selected to maximize diversity of institutional types from among programs large enough to make focus groups feasible. We view our focus group findings as suggestive and hope they lay the groundwork for more rigorous hypothesis testing using probability samples.

A total of thirty-five students took part; of this group, 76 percent identified as white, 20 percent as African American, and 8 percent as Asian (students could select more than one racial identity). Most were of “traditional” college age, but 12 percent were 25 or older. A near majority, 48 percent, was raised in small towns with the remainder evenly split between central cities and suburbs. As is typical of young adults, fully 20 percent identified as religious “nones”—atheist or agnostic. The largest religious group, 28 percent, identified simply as “Christian” or “Christian nondenominational,” followed by Roman Catholics (24 percent). However, three of the six Catholics added phrases such as “not practicing” or “not sure.” One Jewish student and two “other” students round out the sample.

It is useful to note that secondary education students do not major in education, but rather in biology, biochemistry, or a similar scientific discipline. They also take a set of required courses in educational psychology, classroom management, and methods of instruction. All four institutions had a dedicated course on the methods of science instruction, and these served as the venues for our focus groups. The institutions differed in only small ways in their formal requirements for a degree in science. For example, the biology major typically entailed year-long introductions to biology, chemistry, organic chemistry, physics, and calculus, often supplemented by a required course on cell/molecular biology. Students would then add four to five additional courses as major electives, though at some schools students selected a coherent elective track (e.g., in organisms or in population biology) that served to focus the electives.

The four institutions differed most dramatically in the extensiveness of student teaching. At the low end, students in the master’s-granting institution had two student-teaching experiences and neither lasted an entire semester. In contrast, the Catholic college had a five-stage program that began with observation of classrooms as freshmen, continued with encounters with school-age children on the campus as sophomores, and concluded with a fifteen-week student-teaching experience. Of course the institutions also differed in the breadth and sophistication of the research being conducted by their science faculties. However, none of the thirty-five aspiring teachers reported having become a member of a professor’s laboratory; thus, research opportunities may have differed but students were unable to avail themselves of these opportunities. ²

Below we report the results of our focus groups, which show that, in several critical respects, young preservice teachers are already on a path that is likely to lead to evolution instruction that falls short of the expectations of leading scientific organizations. We demonstrate this by illustrating how young preservice teachers’ expectations relate to each of the three pillars of creationism.

Doubt and Confidence in the Science Classroom

In The Battle for America’s Classrooms, we speculated that teachers contributed to public opinion about evolution in a number of ways. First, we argued that many teachers themselves lacked expertise in evolutionary biology (see also Rutledge and Warden 2000). Not surprisingly, teachers who understand a subject well will teach it differently than a subject they know less well (Carlsen 1991), and in the case of evolution in particular, a lack of self-confidence in content knowledge leads teachers to deemphasize evolution (Rutledge and Mitchell 2002; Griffith and Brem 2004). For many teachers in our survey who personally accepted evolution, this lack of expertise made them concerned about their ability to navigate controversy initiated by a student, parent, administrator, or other members of the community. For example, a teacher from Illinois with between 6 and 10 years on the job noted, “after my undergraduate studies my perception of evolution was inaccurate. It wasn’t till after I received a master of science that I felt like I had a good and accurate understanding of evolution and how natural selection happens.” ³ Likewise, a new teacher from Ohio disclosed that she was nervous meeting parents but, “the longer I teach, the more comfortable I feel in covering evolution.”

Others harbored doubts about the validity of evolutionary science. For example, a Texas educator with more than 20 years of seniority told us, “I would just like to say that I do believe in evolution to a point—that living things can evolve due to extreme pressures of situations that lead to a change; however, I do often have problems with human evolution.”

But how does this happen? How is it possible that large percentages of certified biology teachers, almost all of whom majored in biology when in college, doubt the scientific consensus? And are we still producing new teachers who harbor such doubts?

Our focus group participants suggest that the answer to the last question is “yes.” For example, one preservice teacher at a comprehensive state university struggled with evolution,

There is evidence to support evolution to the extent of how everything came from one cell. I don’t know if I believe that. As far as adaptations and adapting to your environment, you can prove that with just microbial colonies. That’s somethin’ that I can look at and see that’s true over a period of time. As far as everything coming from one cell, that’s kind of hard for me to imagine. I’m not saying it’s not true or it is true, ’cause there is a lot of scientific support for it. It’s kind of back and forth in my mind.

A preservice teacher at a historically black college admitted, “I’m you know, pretty ignorant on this topic like in general, but is there enough of scientific evidence to say for sure?” and a biology major at a major research university told us that “evolution is one of those subjects that I’m still a bit shaky about.”

The reasons that students are “shaky” are manifold. First, their own K–12 education may not have covered evolution. As one student at a comprehensive public university noted, “I think my teachers effectively dodged the question. I can’t recall us ever talking about it once, actually, now that I really think about it.” A student from a small Catholic college noted, “I’m pretty sure I did, it’s been a while.”

Required general biology classes at the college level at three of the four institutions included significant time devoted to evolution, especially in courses that emphasize population biology. Nevertheless, this coverage did not translate into more than superficial knowledge for many of our focus group participants. One preservice teacher at a research university—talking about biology classes that had substantial content on evolution—confessed, “I don’t really remember [biology] 110 or like any of the 200s to be honest with you.”

Interestingly, this lack of expertise did not concern any of our preservice teachers. This is not to say that they were unconcerned that evolution might arise as a potential controversy. Quite the contrary. As one student at our research university group put it, “Hopefully I don’t have parents yelling at me.” But they also felt that they would have resources to deal with such issues and that these would come not from their deep knowledge of the science but instead from skills in avoiding controversy through effective classroom management.

We probed a bit deeper into whether classroom skills and technique could compensate for a lack of knowledge of the substance of evolution by asking each group a variant of the following question:

When you think about your own classroom and how to teach controversial topics like climate change or evolution, what do you think is going to be most important for you? Really understanding the science? Or having the methods training that gives you pedagogical and classroom management skills to deal with the controversial topic?

And almost universally future teachers from all four institutions mentioned classroom management. The following sequence among mostly elementary education students at a historically black college captures this:

This was echoed by a student at the master’s-granting institution:

The impression we got is that classroom management techniques and skills to negotiate controversy were aspects of professional capital that students felt they needed to absorb, internalize, and have at the ready. They understood that the content of science was also critical in any encounter with a skeptical parent or community member, but they did not feel they needed to own the content in the same way that they needed to become masters of management techniques. This came through in a similar discussion at the master’s-granting institution.

The young future teacher did not envision she would have to review methods of handling controversy. Presumably she would already know those. But she did not envision knowing the scientific material well enough to defend the scientific content without having “all [her] materials.”

This presumption that the content is easily accessible is complemented by related characteristics that we observed consistently in all four institutions. Many of these future teachers expressed a love of nature, and some had envisioned careers as veterinarians or forest conservationists. But very few showed a passion for science more generally and scientific research in particular. Indeed, most showed little interest in popular science. We asked how they keep up with contemporary science, and this exchange at our research university was typical:

In short, a majority of the focus group participants felt that they could continue to learn science content on the job, but what they really needed as preservice and student teachers was training and experience in the methods of science instruction and classroom management. Thus, they were destined to start their careers with “shaky” content knowledge. Unfortunately, quantitative analyses of data from our survey of in-service teachers show quite clearly that content knowledge matters. Teachers who, while in college, had taken a stand-alone course in evolution or took more credits in science than other courses tended to teach evolution more consistently with the scientific consensus and devoted more classroom time to the topic. And although we could not measure content knowledge directly, we did ask them to rate their own knowledge of evolution in comparison with their peers. We found that the higher the self-assessment of content mastery, the more rigorous the instruction in evolution (Berkman and Plutzer 2010, 174–93).

In short, within every generation of science teachers there will be substantial variation in content expertise. Although there is considerable policy debate concerning the relative importance of content knowledge and what Shulman dubbed “pedagogical content knowledge” (1987), our survey of in-service teachers showed, as we mentioned, that those with the strongest content mastery tend to provide the most rigorous instruction in evolution for their students. Content mastery is a variable that can be changed by policies (require more or different coursework) and by the initiative of educators themselves. And yet those students who are shaky on evolution as they approach student-teaching seemed unconcerned, expecting that classroom management skills would see them through any controversies that arose. But much like their older in-service colleagues whom we surveyed for our book, only a small number of our preservice teachers appeared well equipped to offer a rigorous treatment of evolution for the next generation of students.

Fairness and Balance versus Teaching the Science as Scientists See It

We have previously argued that many in-service teachers can undermine the integrity of evolutionary biology when they legitimize nonscientific alternatives—even when doing so falls far short of providing “equal time” to creationism or intelligent design. Referring to well-organized attempts to deliberately undercut evolution, Scott argues that the second pillar of the creationist movement is the principle that fairness demands that if evolution is on the public school curriculum, then some balance is necessary. This balance might be discussion of “creation science,” intelligent design, or discussion of the “weaknesses” of evolutionary theory.

A substantial minority of practicing classroom teachers that we surveyed in 2007 embraced this principle of fairness. This included almost all of the unabashed creationists (estimated as 14–21 percent of all public school biology teachers; Berkman and Plutzer 2010, 138), but also many who rejected creationism. For example, a teacher from South Dakota told us, “I consider myself strongly on the side of evolution, but I do recognize the validity of creationism, and more importantly I recognize that we have an obligation to expose students to both. Let them decide, based on solid education and background.”

However, none of the preservice teachers who participated in our focus groups expressed this opinion. ⁴ Some students felt that giving class time to creationism could be justified, though not in terms of fairness. Rather, they saw giving time to creationism in the classroom as an effective way to connect with students. A student at our state-owned comprehensive university said:

If you can open up a classroom discussion about what they feel and where they stand, and then looking for ways to bring those two together, those beliefs that, okay, there could be—or even just sharing the theory, I guess—I don’t even wanna say it’s a theory, but the potential of a deity or God working through evolution, something like that, I just think that would help diffuse situations. Even if you don’t believe in God or believe in faith, I think it’s hard to refute the fact that that would make the teaching aspect of it better because your students won’t be as much against it.

Others did not go so far as to propose a balanced curriculum but thought that they would try to put more religiously conservative students at ease by placing evolutionary theory and Biblical creationism on the same plane. One woman from our research university told us, “I mean I would present it as this is another belief, it’s not the same thing as yours but just to be an informed person, you know like, you want to take a look at [it].”

For this teacher, balance is achieved implicitly because evolution is just “another belief,” even as she did not think she needed to present “both sides” in the debate for reasons of fairness. One reason that preservice teachers are leery of the fairness argument undoubtedly stems from their keen awareness of the dangers faced by young, untenured teachers who might venture toward equal time for both sides. Students from the historically black university, some of whom were in the midst of student teaching, immediately perked up at this possibility:

Our impression then is that virtually none of the preservice teachers were motivated to teach both sides as a matter of fairness. And yet we found that a large number of in-service educators did make appeals to fairness. There are two possible, related explanations for this, neither of which we can support or reject from the data we have here. One is that younger teachers’ behavior is shaped more by state standards than is that of more seasoned teachers. We did find some evidence of this (Berkman and Plutzer 2010), and Pennsylvania standards do not support equal time. Fairness, however, may be a learned behavior, acquired on the job and as teachers are further removed from their instruction around state standards. It could well be that “teaching both sides” emerges only after teachers get a sense of boundaries. Preservice teachers all understand that church-state issues will be raised by a discussion of Noah’s flood, which is used by some creation scientists to account for the ordering of fossils in geographic strata. But it may be only with experience that they learn that raising issues of irreducible complexity—a central concept in intelligent design/creationism—might avoid controversy.

But if none of our preservice teachers explicitly embraced the principle that one has to be fair and therefore teach “both sides,” they did foreshadow another type of behavior we previously identified as one that dilutes evolution instruction—the instinct to downplay certain aspects of evolutionary biology to avoid controversy and confrontation.

In open-ended answers to our 2007 survey, in-service teachers reported a wide range of tactics to make evolution less controversial. These included focusing on microbiology, avoiding speciation in general, and avoiding speciation among primates in particular. Some reported avoiding the “E term” and instead using the language of “adaption,” and “change over time.” For many, conflict avoidance involved disassociating oneself from evolutionary science by transferring the “blame” for having to learn evolution to state standards and high stakes test writers (Berkman and Plutzer 2010, 115–46).

We saw early examples of all of these in our focus groups. One young woman at our Catholic college noted, “If I teach evolution I would focus more on just straight evolution. And not really talk about the origin of the world too much.” She imagined how she would respond to resistance by invoking state standards, “I’m required to teach this to your student according to Pennsylvania public state standards [but don’t worry, because] I’m not touching . . . on your creation; I’m not gonna change your child’s view.”

A very similar response came from two students at the comprehensive public university: “That’s not my call. This is something that is required by me by the Pennsylvania state to teach and it’s something that—again, it’s just not my call.” This then elicited a resonant response from another student, “I would be like, ‘Okay, [if] your student doesn’t . . . learn this, then I wouldn’t be doing my job.’ If they really pushed it, I would say, ‘Well, my administration also tells me this is what I have to . . . [teach]’”

Some students felt that they would be able to minimize controversy by making evolutionary biology less consequential: “I feel like it should be taught, but I think we should try to eliminate the belief part of it, like make it clear that you can believe what you want to believe. It’s not affecting your education or anything. It’s just a theory.”

Finally, we should observe that no student we spoke with indicated that they would be warriors on either side of the evolution war. One student who was especially conflicted on issues of faith and science (which we discuss in the next section) indicated a desire to not teach science at all but to develop a career in youth ministry. But even the students most articulate about evolution did not really identify with bench scientists who are most vocal in fighting for evolution in public schools. Thus, their primary identification as educators rather than scientists suggests that they are relatively passive recipients of arguments and political communication from elites and groups trying to shape popular opinion. It is important to recognize that this need not be the case. Certainly many college students choose to study topics such as sustainability, alternative medicine, or the novels of Ayn Rand because they see themselves as future members of advocacy coalitions. But none of the preservice teachers related to larger political movements or controversies in this way.

In sum, we did not find any evidence that new teachers begin their jobs with a belief that fairness requires giving some formal time to discussion of nonscientific alternatives to evolution. But in ways that are very similar to practicing classroom teachers, they anticipate treading lightly on evolution as a means of both preempting potential conflict and dealing with controversy that arises. We should emphasize that there was considerable diversity in how students anticipated they would handle evolution in the classroom. These ranged from minimal approaches accommodating some of their students’ sensitivities to matter of fact “teach the standards” approaches. None showed at this early stage in their careers that they would be strong advocates of evolutionary science, though it may be that such advocacy is a learned skill or an inclination that emerges later. For these reasons, none of the many advances and confirmations in evolutionary biology during the last three decades is likely to be effectively communicated to the next generation of public school students. This can go a long way to explain the remarkable stability of evolution opinion in the face of rising educational attainment and sustained scientific support for evolutionary theory in general and the notion of shared ancestry in particular.

Perceived Conflicts between Science and Faith

Perhaps the biggest barrier to the acceptance of evolution by students, parents, and even teachers is the idea that the acceptance of evidence for evolution undermines one’s faith. This position has been labeled as the third pillar of creationism by Scott (2009). The implication is that, as a political and rhetorical strategy, anti-evolution activists can build popular support by insisting that evolution contradicts the Bible and sacred traditions.

It is not surprising that the scientific community has devoted major resources to countering this. The National Research Council’s Science, Evolution, and Creationism (2008) is a high profile report that argues

Today, many religious denominations accept that biological evolution has produced the diversity of living things over billions of years of Earth’s history. Many have issued statements observing that evolution and the tenets of their faiths are compatible. Scientists and theologians have written eloquently about their awe and wonder at the history of the universe and of life on this planet, explaining that they see no conflict between their faith in God and the evidence for evolution. . . . Attempts to pit science and religion against each other create controversy where none needs to exist. (2008, 12)

Our focus groups revealed that the tension between science and faith is experienced—sometimes acutely—by a large number of future science teachers. Our groups revealed also that many students have spent time reflecting on possible contradictions and have arrived at a personal, though perhaps temporary, resolution.

In this latter group were several preservice teachers attending the private Catholic college.

But accommodation was the exception rather than the norm at the other three colleges we visited. Consider these two women at the large research university:

Also struggling with this was a student at the comprehensive university,

My faith is a big part of who I am and very important to me. To me, it’s a question of—I believe the Bible to be true. It’s a question of, in Genesis when it talks about a six day account of creation . . . is that a literal thing or is that a figurative literary device that’s kind of poetic? I’m not really sure.

It is perhaps not surprising that the Catholic college students had given this more thought and had arrived at more mature reflections on this: all of these students were required to take a theology class each year in which discussions of how the spiritual world relates to the material one were common. Moreover, their science professors could easily integrate such discussions into their classes as well, knowing that this would be consistent with the mission of the institution and with the knowledge that campus administrators see no inherent conflict between faith and evolution.

But the implications of this pattern are telling. Upwards of 70 percent of future teachers prepare for teacher certification at master’s-level comprehensive universities or larger doctoral-granting institutions. To the extent that our sampled institutions are representative of others in the same Carnegie classification, many newly minted science teachers will be entering the classroom without having personally resolved perceived contradictions between evolution and their faith. One has to wonder whether they would have the motivation to teach evolutionary biology forthrightly, especially as they perceive this part of the curriculum as a potential minefield for complaints from students, parents, and members of the community.

Discussion and Policy Implications

The very first section in the National Research Council’s Science, Evolution, and Creationism (2008) is headlined, “The scientific evidence supporting biological evolution continues to grow at a rapid pace” and its second is, “Biological evolution is the central organizing principle of modern biology.” This is the forthright treatment of evolution that science leaders would like to see in every high school. But is it reasonable for us to expect young educators to assert this as boldly when they themselves are not fully sold on the science, have unresolved tensions with their faith, and see either watering down evolution or giving credence to “both sides” as a means of conflict avoidance? We suggest that it is not.

Our focus group data highlight how the pipeline of future science teachers represents a barrier to broader changes in knowledge and opinion in the wider public. A large number of students we met did not seem ready to step into classrooms and be agents of change that could help to move the needle of public understanding to be more in line with the scientific consensus.

These data provide support for the notion that promoting scientific understanding involves reforming educational programs for preservice teachers (Branch, Scott, and Rosenau 2010). Our data also suggest that such efforts will be challenging because they need to address several different issues.

First, and most fundamentally, future teachers need to be more engaged in the content of evolutionary science. Few of our prospective science teachers seemed to have entered their science education programs with a deep and passionate love of science per se. A very small number expressed a lifelong fascination with nature. Most of the others struck us as more committed to becoming teachers than becoming scientists. Further, the opportunities for formal coursework covering evolutionary biology varied across institutions, but nowhere was evolution a consistent theme reinforced throughout the completion of a biology course of study. Taken together, we see little in the preservice experience that would lead to teachers developing a strong and unshakeable acceptance of and commitment to evolution. Indeed, the challenges of completing extensive coursework in pedagogy and devoting a semester or more to student teaching may limit how much deep understanding students gain from majoring in biology or other scientific fields.

Second, instruction in evolutionary biology often takes place without accounting for the difficulties that some students have in working through the complex relationship between their faith and the evidence from science. Only students at our Catholic college had opportunities to work out these tensions within the context of their program of study—in both their science and theology classes. And Catholic students do this within an environment of acceptance of evolution, a perspective emphasized to us by an administrator at the Catholic college. Indeed, we were struck that there may be more acceptance among the Catholic clergy than the students. ¹ But other students typically confronted these issues in just one or perhaps two sessions of their teaching methods classes. And we had a strong sense that the science professors at nonsectarian schools were much less comfortable or interested in discussing these issues than those at the Catholic school we visited.

Finally, many students lack good models for teaching evolution in public schools. Many of our future teachers were themselves not exposed to evolution, and at at least one school (state owned) there was student consensus that student-teaching opportunities were too brief to gain substantial experience with challenging topics. Since many of the students who did not have good instruction in high school want to return to those same schools, we see evidence of a feedback loop that can recreate scientific illiteracy generation after generation—what we have elsewhere referred to as a “cycle of ignorance.”

The policy implications are sobering. Effective interventions to break this feedback loop will need to improve content knowledge while allowing students to work through very real concerns about what the acceptance of evolutionary science means for their faith. Where robust opportunities for student teaching are limited, as was the case on at least one of the studied campuses, expanding opportunities could provide students with models for dealing with evolution forthrightly and consistent with the ideals of the National Research Council—without undue fear of controversy.

What might such interventions look like? Certainly there have been suggestions by us and others to require instruction in evolutionary science for all future biology teachers (Berkman and Plutzer 2011; Branch, Scott, and Rosenau 2010). This could be in the form of stand-alone classes in evolution (which, as previously discussed, have a strong association with the rigor of instruction) or better integration of evolution into the entire biology major.

We also believe that expanded experiences to work in active research laboratories—beyond lab courses—would give future teachers a better sense of the nature of scientific inquiry. This, however, would require not only resources, but a change in culture and expectations. Even at the large research institution where there were scores of well-equipped labs in which undergraduates worked, few preservices teachers thought about getting involved in research. This may be due to the large time commitments involved with classroom observation and student-teaching, but not participating in research labs makes it very challenging to become a member of an active research community. However, it is also due to the type of students who want to be science teachers and what that entails for their professional identity. As a science education professor at one of our host institutions speculated, “I have a hunch that, compared to students in the training-to-be-a-scientist track, preservice science teacher education students tend to like ‘knowing stuff’ and sharing that knowledge with others. Their prescientist counterparts may gravitate in another direction because they are more interested in figuring things out.” Thus, getting preservice teachers involved in school research labs would not be a simple transformation to bring about.

Likewise, we think it is unlikely that traditional college courses offered by departments of biology or ecology will afford many students the opportunity to actively explore the relationship of their faith to evolutionary science—at least in public institutions that train the large majority of future teachers. Yet many students might benefit from doing so and be more effective science teachers as a consequence. Thus, both college faculties and professional associations might seek to develop on-campus extracurricular activities and online forums that provide a “space” for such exploration.

These reforms should be viewed as complements, rather than substitutions, for continuing education initiatives designed to enhance the scientific understanding of in-service teachers. The most notable of these is the National Science Foundation’s Research Experiences for Teachers, whose goal is to “help build long-term collaborative partnerships between K–12 STEM teachers, community college faculty, and the NSF university research community.” But this reaches a tiny portion of science educators. Nor would preservice reforms substitute for institutions, such as the National Science Teachers Association or the National Center for Science Education, that provide support and extensive resources for teachers who feel unprepared to teach evolution or who are concerned about (or embroiled in) controversy. Indeed, greater immersion in science content, greater experience in ongoing research projects, and developing a better understanding of how science and faith can co-exist may motivate more teachers to take advantage of these in-service opportunities and continue to read widely about scientific advances.