Promoting Metacognitive Awareness and Self-Regulation of Intuitive Thinking in Evolution Education

Students’ intuitive thinking often proves helpful in different contexts, such as everyday life, but can be an obstacle to learning about evolution. Thus, enhancing students’ evolutionary understanding is often challenging, with intuitive conceptions of evolution still existing after instruction. Consequently, it is necessary to address students’ intuitive conceptions explicitly. Thus, we present two metaconceptual learning activities that make students metacognitively aware of their intuitive conceptions and enable them to self-regulate these in the context of evolution: (a) a self-assessment of one’s conceptions and (b) instruction on the context-dependency of conceptions. Both activities have been found more effective in enhancing students’ evolutionary understanding than traditional instruction focusing solely on scientific conceptions and are, thus, recommended to supplement evolution instruction.