Background: Relatively little information is available regarding the level of acceptance of evolution and knowledge about evolution in different educational settings in Europe. The aim of the present study is to fill this gap and provide a comprehensive overview of the current state of research regarding evolutionary knowledge and acceptance of students and teachers across Europe, based on a systematic literature review.Results: We identified 56 papers for the period 2010–2020, presenting results for 29 European countries. Both knowledge and acceptance of evolution were assessed in 17 studies. Out of 13 instruments most commonly used in the literature, five have been used in the European context so far: ACORNS, CINS, I-SEA, KEE and MATE. Thirty-one other instruments were identified of which 16 were used in studies on knowledge and 15 in studies on acceptance. The extent of knowledge was hard to compare even within groups of the same education level due to the application of different instruments and assessment of different key concepts. Our results illustrate the persistence of misconceptions through all education levels. Comparing acceptance among different education levels and countries revealed a high diversity. However, a lack of evolution in curricula tended to be associated with rejection of evolution in some countries. European studies that investigated both acceptance of evolution and knowledge about evolution varied highly concerning the existence and strength of the relationship between these factors. However, some trends are visible, such as an increase of strength of the relationship the higher the education level.Conclusions: The present review highlights the lack of a standardized assessment of evolutionary knowledge and acceptance of evolution across Europe and, therefore, of reasonably comparable data. Moreover, the review revealed that only about one-third of all studies on acceptance and/or knowledge about evolution provided evidence for local validity and reliability. We suggest the use of assessment categories for both knowledge and acceptance instruments to allow for interpretation and comparison of sum scores among different sample groups. This, along with prospective comparative research based on similar samples, paves the way for future research aimed at overcoming current biases and inconsistencies in results.

The ability to make evidence-based decisions, and hence to reason on questions concerning scientific and societal aspects, is a crucial goal in science education and science communication. However, science denial poses a constant challenge for society and education. Controversial science issues (CSI) encompass scientific knowledge rejected by the public as well as socioscientific issues, i.e., societal issues grounded in science that are frequently applied to science education. Generating evidence-based justifications for claims is central in scientific and informal reasoning. This study aims to describe attitudes and their justifications within the argumentations of a random online sample (N = 398) when reasoning informally on selected CSI. Following a deductive-inductive approach and qualitative content analysis of written open-ended answers, we identified five types of justifications based on a fine-grained category system. The results suggest a topic-specificity of justifications referring to specific scientific data, while justifications appealing to authorities tend to be common across topics. Subjective, and therefore normative, justifications were slightly related to conspiracy ideation and a general rejection of the scientific consensus. The category system could be applied to other CSI topics to help clarify the relation between scientific and informal reasoning in science education and communication.

In evolution education, misconceptions about evolutionary concepts impact students’ learning. Much research exists on assessing knowledge about evolution using different instruments. The current article introduces the KAEVO 2.0 instrument, which includes various evolutionary aspects representing microevolution and macroevolution. The introduced instrument aims to measure knowledge about evolution comprehensively, suitable for both high school students and undergraduates. KAEVO 2.0 is based on KAEVO 1.0 (Beniermann, 2019) and was extended on the basis of a literature and a curricula analysis. These analyses revealed evolutionary concepts that reflect the construct ‘knowledge about evolution’ in high school biology. KAEVO 2.0 was reviewed by evolutionary biology and biology education experts and subsequently modified. Besides these aspects of content validity based on the content analyses, evidence for validity and reliability is provided based on a field-test with 136 biology, 124 non-biology undergraduates, and 146 high school students. We present confirmatory factor analyses (CFA), reliability analyses, correlation analyses and group comparisons for these subgroups. Results indicate that KAEVO 2.0 can be valuable in different application scenarios and is suitable for different age groups. We discuss further use of this instrument and recommend applications of various published instruments to assess different aspects of knowledge about evolution.

Over the past decades, a large body of research has examined students' magnitudes of evolution acceptance and related measurement issues resulting in questions concerning instruments' validity and operationalization. Until now, several studies investigated validity aspects of often‐used evolution acceptance instruments and came to diverging conclusions about instruments' scores comparability. Within the last years, religious identity was identified as a significant predictor for magnitudes of evolution acceptance. However, religious identity can also point to validity issues if aspects of the content under investigation are interpreted differently based on specific religious identity. Additionally, self‐identified creationists could serve as a source of validity evidence due to the assumption that creationists should score lower on an evolution acceptance instrument than groups with more scientifically adequate views. Thus, we aim to provide additional validity evidence for often‐used evolution acceptance instruments within a European context (i.e., Germany) by comparing two groups of particular interest for research in science education: preservice biology teachers and self‐identified creationists. Exploring evidence based on (1) internal structure, (2) relationships with other variables, and (3) test content provides arguments for test interpretations' validity. A total of 286 persons (206 preservice biology teachers and 81 self‐identified creationists) participated in a survey comprised of six often‐used evolution acceptance measures (i.e., MATE, GAENE, I‐SEA, ATEVO, Gallup question, and 100 point questions). Overall, our findings indicate that the six applied instruments demonstrate differences concerning their evidence for sound interpretation. In particular, the DIF and dimensionality analyses lead to the assumption that the GAENE may be multidimensional other than theoretically expected. In general, the multi‐item measures were stronger related to each other than to the general public polls. Using an instrument that differentiates between microevolution and macroevolution is advisable for creationist samples or samples with a remarkable share of creationists' views.

Evolutionary understanding is central to biology. It is also an essential prerequisite to understanding and making informed decisions about societal issues such as climate change. Yet, evolution is generally poorly understood by civil society and many misconceptions exist. Citizen science, which has been increasing in popularity as a means to gather new data and promote scientific literacy, is one strategy through which people could learn about evolution. However, despite the potential for citizen science to promote evolution learning opportunities, very few projects implement them. In this paper, we make the case for incorporating evolution education into citizen science, define key learning goals, and suggest opportunities for designing and evaluating projects in order to promote scientific literacy in evolution.