For those who thought that victory in Dover meant the struggle against creationism and ID had been won, a national survey of American high school biology teachers suggests otherwise. 939 teachers from around the country answered questions concerning their personal beliefs in the origins of life, the amount of time spent teaching evolutionary concepts, and how they handle creationism in class.
Eighty percent responded that they spend between 3-20 hours on general evolutionary processes (natural selection, gene flow, Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium) during the school year. That’s somewhere between 4 and 26 class periods. Fifty-two percent report they spend 2 hours or less on human evolution, and while the researchers lamented that statistic, I don’t find it surprising. Unfortunately, human evolution generally is not part of the state science standards and is not covered by standardized tests, so teachers do not spend valuable class time covering it.
More interesting were the responses to the personal belief questions, which mirror surveys taken of the general public over the last 25 years.
