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Driven by Topics: High School Students’ Interest in Evolutionary Biology

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Abstract

We investigated potential drivers of interest in topic–context and topic–activity combinations, as well as interactions between the different elements of situational interest in evolutionary biology. High school students (n = 982, age 17 years) were asked to rate their interest in two sets of items consisting of topic–context and topic–activity combinations. Rasch modeling, analyses of variance, and descriptive statistics revealed that topics are the dominant dimension and moderate the general level of interest that students express in both topic–context and topic–activity combinations. Qualitative findings from interviews with high school students (n = 6, age 16 years) support this finding. Thus, choice of a particular context, as well as choice of a particular activity, may be less important than previously assumed, since topics are the bottleneck and drive situational interest in topic–context combinations and topic–activity combinations. Implications for evolution education are discussed.

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Acknowledgements

This study was conducted in the context of “Design and Evaluation of Teaching Materials for the Evolution of Life,” a project funded by VolkswagenStiftung on the occasion of Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday. We would like to thank Prof. Dr. Erich Bornberg-Bauer, Dr. Harald Kullmann, Dr. Roman Asshoff, Mayalin Scholz, and the reviewers for their contributions.

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  1. Zentrum für Didaktik der Biologie, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Schlossplatz 34, 48143, Münster, Germany

    Janina Jördens & Marcus Hammann

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  1. Janina Jördens
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  2. Marcus Hammann
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Correspondence to Marcus Hammann.

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Jördens, J., Hammann, M. Driven by Topics: High School Students’ Interest in Evolutionary Biology. Res Sci Educ 51, 599–616 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11165-018-9809-5

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