Abstract
Ph.D.
Evolution of life as a scientific theory was introduced officially into the South African life sciences grade twelve curriculum in 2008. This presented an opportunity to investigate how teachers could incorporate teaching strategies, involving the use of narratives and concept cartoons, into their pedagogical content knowledge to encourage the use of higher-order thinking skills and deep learning about evolution, a new topic in the curriculum. Little research has been done on how narratives and concept cartoons contribute to the development of higher-order thinking skills in teachers and their ability to use these teaching strategies to effect a better conceptualization of evolution.
A mixed methods research design was adopted to establish generalizations about the teachers’ higher-order thinking skills as well as to explore their individual worldviews about evolution as a scientific theory and their perceptions about the controversy between science and religion. The quantitative and main part of the study involved a (quasi)experimental format based on interventions focusing on workshop presentations using either narratives or concept cartoons. A pre-test and post-test format was used to measure the effect of the treatments. A rubric, based on the Piagetian levels of concept development, was designed to transform qualitative responses into quantitative data. The responses to five open-ended questions of a questionnaire were analyzed using the Wilcoxon Signed Rank test and the Mann-Whitney U test. The smaller and supportive phase of the study involved categorizing and then analyzing qualitative data, derived from different artifacts and responses to the questionnaire, in order to establish how the teachers’ worldviews influenced their perceptions of the evolution of life, the nature of science and religion.
An embedded concurrent mixed methods design allowed for the simultaneous generation and collection of quantitative and qualitative data. The findings were integrated and mixed to give a clearer and more global picture not only of the teachers’ ability to use higher-order thinking skills but also to reflect their conceptual ecologies of evolution.