Assessing pre-service science teachers’ academic knowledge and misconceptions about evolution and genetics concepts

Evolution and genetics play a vital role in understanding biology and are widely recognised as unifying, interdisciplinary concepts in biological research. This study has a dual objective. It first assesses pre-service biology teachers’ (PSBTs) knowledge and misconceptions about evolution and genetics. Secondly, it sought to compare these findings across different levels of study and among participants by gender. A pragmatic, sequential, mixed-methods design was employed, involving 240 PSBTs in their 2nd, 3rd, and 4th years of pursuing a Bachelor of Education Science degree at one university in Ghana. The study collected data from the Test on Evolution and Genetics Concepts (TEGIC), semi-structured interviews, and document analysis. Descriptive, inferential, and descriptive-interpretive statistics were used to analyse the data. The results indicated no significant differences in academic success in evolution and genetics among PSBTs, based on year of study and gender. Moreover, the findings revealed numerous misconceptions among the participants on these concepts. Therefore, the study has implications for stakeholders in biology education, suggesting the implementation of innovative teaching strategies, including technology integration, conceptual map development, simulations, differentiated instruction, and semantic feature analysis in the science classroom to enhance students' conceptual understanding of biology.