DOI: 10.5061/dryad.n2z34tmww
title: Following Darwin’s footsteps: Evaluating the impact of an activity designed for elementary school students to link historically important evolution key concepts on their understanding of natural selection

description: 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. --
description: This dataset is the result of the evaluation of elementary school
 students' answers to the evaluation instrument used as pre and post
 test in paper. The evaluation instrument can be found in the appendix of
 the manuscript. Shortly, the evaluation instrument asked students to think forward in
 time and predict the outcome of a biological scenario, and describe how a
 butterfly population would look in 100 years. The test was read aloud to
 the class and students were asked to write a justified prediction and draw
 it.  To evaluate students’ answers, we
 used criteria developed by other authors (Kelemen et al.,
 2014;
 Sá-Pinto et
 al., 2017a) in the context of the aforementioned framework. These were
 complemented with the inclusion of another criterion that targets whether
 students’ predictions integrate information about the selective pressure:
 resource availability. These criteria formed the items of our rubric. The
 complete definitions of each rubric item are provided in Table A2 in
 Appendix . These rubric items allowed us to classify answers according to
 the student’s type of prediction (i.e., fixist, fittest or equilibrium)
 and the justification provided (i.e., developmental, teleological,
 resource availability, differential survival or differential
 reproduction). The level of understanding of
 evolution by natural selection (LUENS) revealed by each answer was
 determined by the sum of the scores attributed for each rubric item
 identified in that answer, regarding both predictions and corresponding
 justifications. A score of 1 was attributed to the items
 "fittest", "resource availability" and
 "differential survival", a score of 2 was attributed to
 "differential reproduction" and a score of zero was attributed
 to all other items. Two independent researchers—one
 evolutionary biologist with a background in science education and one
 elementary school teacher evaluated all the students’ answers. Answers not
 equally rated by the two researchers were discussed and, if a consensus
 could not be reached, these were removed from the
 analysis.
description: For all the items except LUENS, a value of 1,00 means present and
 a value of 0,00 means absent from that students' answers. Missing
 data (items for which  absence or presence could not be ensured, there was
 no agreement between the two coders, or, in case of LUENS, could not be
 estimated) is represented by "?". For LUENS, the presented
 values correspond to the
 sum of the scores attributed for each rubric item identified in that
 answer, regarding both predictions and corresponding justifications. A
 score of 1 was attributed to the items "fittest", "resource
 availability" and "differential survival", a score of 2 was
 attributed to "differential reproduction" and a score of zero
 was attributed to all other items.