Background: Teleology is one of the critical aspects of students’ intuitive concepts about living beings and, specifically, their evolution. This cognitive bias imposes a substantial restriction on the process of learning such content. In this work, we rely on epistemological, psychological and pedagogical analyses to substantiate an educational proposal centered on the concepts of epistemological obstacles and metacognitive vigilance.Results: Based on Michael Ruse’s epistemological analysis, according to which teleology in biology persists because the scientific explanation of adaptation necessarily involves appeal to the metaphor of design, and on research in cognitive psychology, especially in relation to metacognition and self-regulated learning, we argue that the primary educational aim must be to encourage students to develop metacognitive skills to regulate the use of teleological reasoning. We develop our instructional proposal based on the didactic concepts of epistemological obstacles and metacognitive vigilance (consistent with epistemological and psychological analyses).Conclusion: We briefly discuss the instructional implications of our analysis and some possible relationships between our proposal and other lines of research in psychology and science education.

Teacher education can benefit directly from experiences in non-formal settings. This article presents a research study with elementary teachers who were teaching in public schools in the state of Nuevo León, México, and participated in a STEM Continuous Professional Development (CPD) workshop. The workshop provided a platform for teachers to interact with scientists and disseminators of science, allowing the appropriation of scientific knowledge applied to everyday activities and settings. Participants improved the quality of their teaching practices in classrooms and gained a new understanding of STEM subjects, enabling them to promote inspiring learning experiences with their students, where dialogue, experimentation and elucidation became an important part of their lessons. The study was carried out using ethnographic tools for analysing recorded videos, 15 sets of field notes, and 49 questionnaires. The sequential analysis of talk and gestures in their participation in the CPD workshop demonstrated high levels of involvement, creativity, and collaborative solution of STEM problems.

Essentialism is a way of reasoning that implies assuming that the members of a group share an immutable essence, and that the variation among the members of the group is negligible. Although this way of reasoning is useful for people in their everyday lives, it may pose difficulties in the learning of scientific models, particularly those of evolutionary biology. Essentialism, understood as an epistemological obstacle, requires some didactic work encouraging the development of metacognitive vigilance, in other words, the awareness and regulation of this way of thinking. In this article, we will characterize the processes of metacognitive regulation of essentialism that took place during a didactic sequence to teach evolution. The sequence was implemented in a secondary school in Argentina with 80 students. We will present some of the possibilities and difficulties of carrying out metacognitive regulation of essentialism in biology classrooms. From the use of thematic analysis, we have found that students seem to regulate essentialism in an implicit way during discussions with their classmates, at both the individual and social levels. Moreover, in the case of evolution learning, we distinguished two types of specific regulations: the regulation of ‘typologism’ and that of ‘noise’. In this sense, we consider that essentialism is not regulated as a whole, but instead through some of its assumptions. This work will allow further thinking about the possibilities of promoting the metacognitive regulation of epistemological obstacles in biology classes.

Enseñanza de la evolución: fundamentos para el diseño de una propuesta didáctica basada en la modelización y la metacognición sobre los obstáculos epistemológicos

Se caracterizan las representaciones (dibujos y maquetas) de los modelos iniciales sobre la digestión humana de un grupo de profesoras, así como su evolución al finalizar un taller de capacitación. El análisis se realiza en dos niveles: descriptivo e interpretativo. En el interpretativo se generan cuatro ideas clave: continuidad, interacción, transformación e integración, que permiten la identificación de cuatro modelos iniciales y uno final. De los iniciales, el IV resulta completo únicamente para la idea de continuidad. El modelo de arribo resulta completo para las ideas de continuidad e interacción y presenta cambios parciales para la idea de transformación y ausencia de la idea de integración. Se discute la influencia del tipo de soporte semiótico, así como la utilidad de las cuatro ideas planteadas para el análisis de representaciones y el desarrollo de intervenciones didácticas sobre el modelo de digestión humana.