Creationism and evolution views of brazilian teachers and teachers-to-be

Abstract

This paper aims at assessing the evolutionist and creationist conceptions of Brazilian teachers. The work was developed within the framework of the European project BIOHEAD-CITIZEN, which takes into account that scientific knowledge and teachers’ attitudes and values can influence the teaching practices. The large questionnaire BIOHEAD-CITIZEN, which was constructed to be applied in 19 countries in Europe, Africa and in Middle East, was applied, in this study, to six groups of Brazilian teachers: Primary school teachers, Biology teachers and Portuguese language teachers and corresponding teachers-to-be. For this paper the answers to questions about evolution were used as dependent variables. Descriptive and multivariate analyses were carried out. Biology teachers and Biology teachers-to-be give more importance to the natural selection and the evolution process than the other groups of teachers. Comparing to the BIOHEAD-CITIZEN countries, the total Brazilian sample showed a higher percentage of creationist conceptions, particularly the Brazilian Biology teachers and teachers-to-be. As discussed herein, this may not be an obstacle for teaching evolution as they accept both creationist and evolutionist concomitantly.