In a worrying new paper appearing in PLoS Biology, "Evolution and Creationism in America's Classrooms: A National Portrait", Michael B. Berkman and his colleagues have published the results of a national survey of High School biology teachers, and the findings don't make pleasant reading [1].

I'll start with a quick look at the methodology. The bare bones are thus: "Between March 5 and May 1, 2007, 939 teachers participated in the study, either by mail or by completing an identical questionnaire online [invitation only]. Our overall response rate of 48% yielded a sample that may be generalized to the population of all public school teachers who taught a high school–level biology course in the 2006–2007 academic year, with all percentage estimates reported in this essay's tables and figures having a margin of error of no more than 3.2% at the 95% confidence level."

48% seems like quite a low response rate, but the authors note that responses from teacher surveys have fallen dramatically in the last 20 years or more, citing the example of a survey repeated in 1986, 1996, and 1999 that achieved response rates of 42%, 26% and 18% respectively. In spite of this drop in response rate, accuracy hasn't fallen, and set against other surveys, 48% is an excellent response, providing a good representation of the population. In short then, the survey should give pretty accurate results.

Some 2% of teachers avoided evolution entirely, in direct defiance of American state and federaly teaching standards. 17% avoided human evolution entirely, with 60% devoting 1-5 hours on the subject. More shockingly, "only 23% strongly agreed that evolution served as the unifying theme for their biology or life sciences courses; these teachers devoted 18.5 hours to evolution, 50% more class time than other teachers. When we asked whether an excellent biology course could exist without mentioning Darwin or evolutionary theory at all, 13% of teachers agreed or strongly agreed that such a course could exist."

That 1 in 7 biology teachers believe evolution is not essential in an "excellent biology course" and less than 1 in 4 believe that it is a unifying theme in biology is a shocking indictment not just of the standard of American teaching, but of the quality of education that teachers have received. Clearly a gulf has emerged between scientists and science teachers.

Creationism of course (or I.D., which for these purposes is the same thing) shouldn't be appearing in science classes at all, so what did the survey show here?

25% of teachers had spent at least 1 or 2 hours on creationism or intelligent design, but as the authors point out this number is misleading, since many teachers bring it up in order to criticize it or respond to students' questions. Further questions in the survey were designed to break this figure down. "Of the 25% of teachers who devoted time to creationism or intelligent design, nearly half agreed or strongly agreed that they teach creationism as a 'valid scientific alternative to Darwinian explanations for the origin of species.' Nearly the same number agreed or strongly agreed that when they teach creationism or intelligent design they emphasize that 'many reputable scientists view these as valid alternatives to Darwinian Theory'."

This equates to around 12-13%, or 1 in 8 teachers. To repeat, the implication is that one eighth of biology teachers are teaching American children that creationism is a valid scientific alternative to evolution supported by many reputable scientists.

Teaching emphasis will clearly change according to personal beliefs, but the researchers also looked at state standards. Recently in the U.S. there have been a number of high profile cases of creationists gaining entry to school boards and so on, but in fact the researchers found that states couldn't account for more than about 10% of the variance in teaching styles, with 90% of cross-teacher variation occuring within states.

Personal education and belief then seems to play a larger part here, and questions on this topic were included in the survey. "Our data suggest that high school teachers who completed the largest number of college-level credits in biology and life science classes and whose coursework included at least one class in evolutionary biology devote substantially more class time to evolution than teachers with fewer credit hours". Clearly better education of science teachers in the first place leads to better classroom performance, as we'd expect.

As for belief, here are the results in graph form, presented in comparison with the American general public:

16% of high school biology teachers in the United States are creationists who believe that God created man in the last 10,000 years. Another 9% of respondents bizarrely didn't answer the question, which is odd considering the topic of the survey. Possibly the authors may have made a mistake by lumping creationism in with "within the last 10,000 years or so", thus leaving no category left for those who believe man was created perhaps millions of years ago. If so, that would suggest that even the frankly terrifying figure of 16% is an underestimate. The results aren't catastrophically bad, but are clearly worse than many may have expected.

The authors make some recommendations: "These findings strongly suggest that victory in the courts is not enough for the scientific community to ensure that evolution is included in high school science courses. Nor is success in persuading states to adopt rigorous content standards consistent with recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences and other scientific organizations. Scientists concerned about the quality of evolution instruction might have a bigger impact in the classroom by focusing on the certification standards for high school biology teachers. Our study suggests that requiring all teachers to complete a course in evolutionary biology would have a substantial impact on the emphasis on evolution and its centrality in high school biology courses."

This is another piece of research explaining not only the details of the problem we face, but also how evolutionary biologists could be tackling the problem, by building stronger ties between scientists and science teachers, and campaigning for better teacher education.

If P.Z. Myers and others are really interested in more than just ranting at a select audience of blog readers, or getting their names in the papers over the latest crackpot movie, this kind of initiative is what they should be putting their energies into.

[1] Berkman, M.B., Pacheco, J.S., Plutzer, E. (2008). Evolution and Creationism in America's Classrooms: A National Portrait. PLoS Biology, 6(5), e124. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0060124