Creationism and evolution in school: Religious students can’t learn natural selection.

Education researchers have studied how well religious students are able to learn about evolution. Some researchers suggest that creationist beliefs prevent students from understanding evolution, since creationism teaches that a supernatural being created the world and all its life forms. But others claim students can understand evolution even if they don’t accept that it happened. What does this conflict over how students learn about evolution mean for Wortman and science teachers like him? And what does it mean for the students, like that younger, creationist version of me, who sit in biology classrooms? Can they cope with evolution?

One point of consensus exits among science education researchers: Religion affects how people understand evolution. “The role of religion is really robust,” said Josh Rosenau, a programs and policy director for the National Center for Science Education. “I have no question that a person’s view of their own religion shapes how that person is prepared to respond to questions about evolution.”

Leslie Rissler is an evolutionary ecologist and biogeographer who taught an upper-level evolution course for biology majors for more than 10 years at the University of Alabama. Some of her students said their high school science teachers—even in public schools—skipped the evolution unit altogether or taught creationism alongside evolution as an alternative scientific theory. A 2007 Penn State study involving 926 science educators found that about 13 percent of biology teachers are openly sympathetic to creationism in their classroom. The comments about those creationist science teachers that Rissler overheard in her class prompted her research addressing evolution education, published online last fall in Evolution: Education and Outreach.

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Rissler concluded that deeply religious students are less likely to either understand or accept evolution than are their less religious peers. “The more religious are less scientifically literate,” she said. “The data are clear on this. It’s just that people don’t like to hear it.”

Creationism and evolution in school: Religious students can’t learn natural selection.