Where does this misconception come from? Well, that’s easy. Let’s start with this one: Natural selection eliminates all “bad” variations. But it’s also an absolutely marvelous way of getting to understand what misconceptions are out there among our students. So we read actual student responses, and we debate, and we argue, and we think about fairness, and intellectual worth, and accuracy…it’s exhausting. And just a few people (for the last two years, myself among them) determine just how this should be done. A computer does not score their responses-humans do. We ask students to answer multi-part questions in their own words. The MCAS is one of a few state tests that has open-response, long-answer questions. What was my point? Yes, summers in windowless rooms. It forever changed how I view the education-related problems we face. I’m also incredibly grateful for the insights I gained. Every single one of those people wants the best for the students in Massachusetts, and I’m proud to have worked with them. I will say this, however: I got to spend two years working with some of the most amazing science educators and science professionals in my state. Now, goodness knows there are a lot of opinions out there on the subject of statewide testing, but this is not the place for such a discussion. The high school test is in one of four subjects: biology, chemistry, introductory physics, or technology engineering. Most of my time in this role was spent developing our state test, the MCAS, which for science is administered in grades 5, 8, and 10. At the time, I was working for the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education as a member of its science curriculum and instruction team. I preface this by explaining that I spent my last two summers in a windowless room up to my eyeballs in student test papers. I’ve already talked about one of the most pervasive evolution misconceptions, that evolution occurs to serve a particular purpose, but there are oh so many more out there that I thought it’d be worth the electrons to dig into a few.
This is going to be the first in what I hope will be a series of posts devoted to common misconceptions about evolution, climate change, and the nature of science.
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