Abstract:
Although there exists a great deal of research that analyzes the way in which the students explain adaptive evolution, few studies address how they explain the origin of new species. In this work, we characterize, based on a qualitative interpretative methodology, the way in which students in a secondary school in Argentina explain the origin of new species. For this purpose we use an open questionnaire in which we ask the students to explain the origin and extinction of certain species. From the answers we identified two explanatory patterns based on the notion of adaptation and a third on the hybridization. We interpret these responses in terms of a representational hierarchy ranging from the ideas most specifically linked to the cases discussed to the epistemological obstacles that constitute the most general modes of thought underlying.
Keywords:
High school; Biological teaching; Biological evolution
