Conceptions on evolution in teachers and future teachers: results of an Italian investigation

The Italian debate on a Ministry of Education's proposal of eliminating the Darwinian theory of evolution from syllabi was particularly vivacious when the Italian team participating to the EU Biohead project submitted a questionnaire to pre-service and in-service teachers of primary and secondary school levels. The Biohead common developed questionnaire aims at analysing teachers' system of values as well as their interactions with scientific knowledge about nature, body and health, sexuality, biologic determinism, and evolution. In this paper we present the results obtained in Italy by applying a multivariate statistic analysis to the data of the questionnaires. This methodology has been adopted in the Biohead project to highlight correlations and interactions between values, social practice and knowledge according to the model proposed by Clemènt and Hovart (2000) of conceptions, in the French terminology. In particular we focus our attention on the analysis of the questions concerning the conceptions underlying the propensity to support the theory of evolution vs the creationism one. The multivariate statistic analysis commonly adopted by the project allows us to outline a complex framework of components that interact in shaping conceptions that support the scientific Darwinian theory or other philosophical/religious approaches. According to this methodology results are presented using a three steps factor analysis composed by: Principal Component Analysis that provides the description of the different characteristics (knowledge, values and social practice) related to teachers' conceptions supporting creationism or the theory of evolution; Between-class method that which provides specific components that maximize the variation between classes or groups of individual; Co-inertia analysis that is used to investigate common trends between two separated subsets of questions, which are however significantly related to each other. The analysis of the Italian data confirms that conceptions supporting the theory of evolution or creationism are shaped along a wide range of positions in which religious beliefs represent only one of many interacting components. The system of values and beliefs represented in the Italian sample of in-service and pre-service teacher does not seem to be particularly influenced by specific knowledge on the evolution process and this represent a characteristics of the Italian results.