Development and evaluation of the knowledge about evolution 2.0 instrument (KAEVO 2.0)

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.

在进化教育研究领域，对进化概念的误解会对学生的学习产生不利影响。目前已有诸多研究借助各类测评工具开展进化知识测评相关工作。本文介绍了KAEVO 2.0测评工具（KAEVO 2.0），其涵盖了代表微进化（microevolution）与宏进化（macroevolution）的各类进化相关维度。该测评工具旨在全面测评进化知识，适用于高中生与本科生群体。KAEVO 2.0以KAEVO 1.0（贝尼尔曼，2019）为基础，通过文献分析与课程分析完成了拓展开发。上述分析梳理出了能够体现高中生物学中“进化知识”这一构念的进化相关概念。KAEVO 2.0已通过进化生物学与生物学教育领域专家的评审，并据此完成了修订。除了基于内容分析构建的内容效度证据外，本研究还通过实地测试获取了效度与信度相关证据：本次测试共招募136名生物学专业本科生、124名非生物学专业本科生以及146名高中生参与。本研究针对上述亚群体开展了验证性因子分析（Confirmatory Factor Analysis, CFA）、信度分析、相关分析以及组间比较分析。研究结果表明，KAEVO 2.0可适用于多种应用场景，且契合不同年龄段的测评需求。本文最后讨论了该测评工具的进一步应用方向，并建议结合多款已发布的测评工具，以全面测评进化知识的不同维度。