How Do Pre-Service Biology Teachers in Switzerland Construe Key Evolution Concepts? An Empirical Study of Conceptualizations

Project scope

Despite the central role of evolutionary theory in modern biology, very few studies in Switzerland have investigated how well it is understood. While national polls indicate that around 60% of the Swiss population accept evolution as the most coherent explanation for human origins, this leaves a significant portion—around 40%—who do not. Furthermore, small-scale studies suggest that students and even first-year university biology students in Switzerland hold misconceptions about evolutionary concepts, likely shaped by their school education.

Given that teachers are key agents in the transmission of scientific knowledge, their own understanding of evolution is of critical importance. A recent large-scale study in Switzerland has revealed challenges in teachers’ acceptance of evolutionary theory, prompting a deeper investigation into how teachers actually conceptualize core evolutionary ideas.

Scientific objective

This project seeks to explore how pre-service biology teachers understand and construe fundamental concepts in evolutionary theory, and how these conceptualizations compare with those found in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. This dual-track approach allows us to map not only individual understandings, but also to assess how aligned these are with the scientific community’s current conceptual landscape.

By combining methods from personal construct psychology (repertory grid technique) and computational linguistics(concept mining and topic modeling), the project offers an innovative and interdisciplinary framework for studying conceptual variation and meaning-making across both educational and academic contexts.

Research questions

1. How do secondary pre-service biology teachers construe KECs?
2. What general patterns exist with respect to secondary pre-service biology teachers’ construal of KECs?
3. What general patterns exist in how science journal articles represent and define KECs?
4. How do the patterns of pre-service biology teachers’ conceptualizations compare to those in science journal articles?

Method

The project unfolds in three phases:

• Phase I involves conducting repertory grid interviews with pre-service biology teachers. This will produce detailed individual maps of how participants construe key evolutionary concepts—data that is currently unavailable at this depth or scale.
• Phase II applies computational linguistic methods to both the interview transcripts and a corpus of scientific articles. This enables comparisons across units of analysis (teachers and articles), using concept frequency, co-occurrence, and topic modeling.
• Phase III synthesizes findings from the previous phases, enabling nuanced comparisons between teacher understandings and scientific conceptualizations, highlighting both gaps and alignments.

Broader impact

This project will offer important insights for teacher education programs in Switzerland. By identifying gaps between scientific and educational conceptualizations of evolution, the findings will help design targeted interventions to better prepare future biology teachers. In doing so, it will contribute to improving science literacy and the quality of evolution education at a national level. At the same time, by analyzing the conceptual structure of scientific literature, the project offers a novel reflection on how evolution is framed in academic discourse, and how that framing may or may not filter into educational practice.