Malthus for kids: The impact of exploring Malthus’ principle on
elementary school students’ understanding of evolution by natural
selection
Abstract
While several researchers have suggested that evolution should be
explored from the initial years of schooling, little information is
available on effective resources to enhance elementary school students’
level of understanding of evolution by natural selection (LUENS). For
the present study, we designed, implemented and evaluated an educational
activity planned for fourth graders to explore concepts and conceptual
fields that were historically important for the discovery of natural
selection. Observation field notes and students’ productions were used
to analyse how the students explored the proposed activity.
Additionally, an evaluation framework consisting of a test, the
evaluation criteria and the scoring process was applied in two
fourth-grade classes to estimate elementary school students’ LUENS
before and after engaging in the activity. Our results suggest that our
activity allowed students to effectively link all of the key concepts in
the classroom and produced a significant increase in their LUENS. These
results indicate that our activity had a positive impact on students’
understanding of natural selection. They also reveal that additional
activities and minor fine-tuning of the present activity are required to
further support students’ learning about the concept of differential
reproduction. We also observed a low level of teleological predictions
for both pre- and post-tests.