Learning and teaching the essential tenants of evolutionary biology as well as constructing and evaluating explanations for evolutionary phenomena is broadly considered a fundamental feature and core practices of science education. However, many empirical studies have shown that students have various difficulties grasping the theory of evolution, which often results in insufficient explanations of evolutionary phenomena in the long run. For this reason, the overarching aim of this symposium is to provide new insights into the obstacles and opportunities for teaching and learning evolution in higher education. The authors of the first contribution investigated how understanding deep time is connected with both evolution knowledge and acceptance in groups of first-year university students from 26 European countries. Following that, the authors of the second contribution examined how a classroom simulation for evolution education combined with a chatbot influences pre-service biology teachers' diagnostic competence. Then, the authors of the third contribution argue that expert evolutionary reasoning across species (including humans) requires a metacognitive competency to co-regulate patterns of agential and decentralized reasoning. They therefore present a novel framework for characterizing possible patterns of causal reasoning backed up by some early empirical work. The authors of the fourth and last contribution conducted interviews with tree-building-experts to characterize the approach of the experts and identified skills relevant for building a phylogenetic tree to generate an empirical model for tree-building-skills. Overall, all contributions deal with processes and concepts of evolution that are difficult to grasp (e.g., deep time, tree-building). At the same time, the contributions point out possibilities to address these learning difficulties or to support pre-service teachers in their education for the difficult task of addressing evolution in school. The contributions of the symposium thus offer individual insights into possibilities and difficulties for knowing about and dealing with learners' ideas.

Aspects of deep time are regularly taken up in biology education and seem to be difficult to understand for learners of all educational levels. The relationship of deep time understanding and both evolution knowledge and acceptance have been very little investigated. In this work, deep time understanding of 8,510 first-year university students from 26 European countries was investigated by analyzing two items focusing on conceptions about time phases of the existence of dinosaurs and humans. Additionally, evolution knowledge in general and evolution acceptance was assessed to investigate the relationship of deep time understanding and both evolution knowledge and acceptance. The results show that although students with a generally high evolution knowledge and acceptance show a tendency toward the scientific estimate, the period of humans’ existence is indicated by most students to be too long. Almost all students clearly classified the dinosaur existence too early in the Earths’ history. This conception suggests a misconception in the temporal classification of evolutionary processes. The conceptions that complex living beings as the dinosaurs already existed in the first third of the Earth's history causes barriers to understand the temporal dimension of evolutionary processes. Even students, who know much about evolution in general, struggle when it comes to deep time understanding. This indicates that deep time is even more difficult to understand than evolution in general. Both evolution knowledge and acceptance correlate positively with deep time understanding. However, evolution knowledge seems to be related more closely to deep time understanding than evolution acceptance. Limitingly, it must be stated that the subgroup of students with high evolution knowledge is notably smaller than the subgroup with high evolution acceptance. In addition, there are single countries that are exceptions from these correlations. Causal explanations for these relations and exceptions could be investigated in future qualitative studies.

Teaching evolution processes requires the teacher's diagnostic competence (i.e., the ability to assess students' evolutionary explanations accurately). However, during biology teacher preparation at university, respective learning opportunities are rare. Digital technologies like classroom simulations offer new ways to address this gap. Intelligent tutoring systems like chatbots that provide instructional support (e.g., feedback, guided activity) may positively affect users' performance and motivation. Thus, this project investigates how a classroom simulation for evolution education combined with a chatbot as a pre-version of an intelligent tutoring system influences pre-service biology teachers' diagnostic competence. The simulation included in this study provides real-like classroom situations in which pre-service biology teachers are prompted to perform formative (i.e., evaluate evolutionary explanations) and summative assessments (i.e., assess virtual students' overall performance). The investigation is divided into two phases: First, using a classroom simulation with an implemented knowledge bot that interacts with the user by answering knowledge queries automatically (e.g., describing a specific misconception). Second, provide formative feedback covering the users' tactics (i.e., choice of question and virtual student) to draw attention to insufficient strategies for reaching the overall goal (i.e., summative assessment of virtual students). A total of 83 persons participated in the first data collection, of which complete data sets exist for 76 participants with 2051 fully diagnosed evolutionary explanations. Participants correctly diagnosed 33% of the evolutionary explanations, but diagnosed pure naïve and pure scientific evolutionary explanations more often correctly than mixed model explanations. In addition, when misconceptions are present, pre-service biology teachers seem to have trouble identifying the correct one. Hence, including feedback on participants' individual diagnoses is needed to point out their incorrect responses. Overall, our study provides first insights into innovative digital opportunities to support pre-service biology teachers' professional development when practical situations are rare.

Humans are born with a drive to notice the behaviors of the agents around us. This drive develops into our expansive capacities for interpreting the minds and goals of those agents. Our propensities for such agential cognition are a foundation for our ability to engage in shared goals and the emergence of societies through culture. Despite this foundational aspect to human reasoning about agency, the development of our conceptual understanding of agency can be far from intuitive. Evolution education, classically conceptualized, has been largely focused on suppressing such agential reasoning. Agential reasoning is often viewed as antagonistic to evolutionary reasoning, and reasoning about agential causes may be framed in dichotomous terms, as oppositional to evolutionary reasoning. Yet, evolutionary processes very frequently involve agents with goals at various levels of organization within complex systems. These goal-directed agents sometimes act in ways that influence trait functions or selection pressures within ecosystems. Thus, how humans develop a generalized and structured scientific understanding of the concept of agency in relation to evolution is of central importance, both to our everyday living, and our scientific literacy, as individuals, communities, and as a species. We present a novel framework and early empirical work in educational design research to support interdisciplinary innovations at the intersection of evolution and sustainability education, focused, in part, on developing a conceptual understanding of agency.

Tree-Thinking is broadly defined as the ability to handle phylogenetic trees. Usually Tree-Thinking is divided into two subsets of skills: Tree-Reading and Tree-Building. Tree-Reading encompasses all skills necessary to gather and infer information from a given tree. Tree-Building encompasses all skills necessary to build a phylogenetic tree from a character table for example. There is an empirical tested skill-model for tree-reading. Neither does such a model exists for tree-building-skills nor is there a common understanding of which skills this subset consists. This is concerning in so far that Tree-Thinking-abilities are part of the Bildungsstandards and are consequently tested in the Abitur. To understand which skills are necessary for tree-reading and how novices could potentially build better phylogenetic trees, we conducted interviews with tree-building-experts. We did two think-aloud tasks and a guided interview with each expert. We characterized the approach of the experts and identified ten skills which they used to build a phylogenetic tree from a given character table. In this process we were able to distinguish more or less effective strategies and could detect typical difficulties. From there on we formulated hints and a favorable course of action for novices to handle those difficulties and to build better trees. On the on hand we hope we can formulate an empirical tested tree-building model based on our findings in this study in the future. On the other hand, we will use our insights to generated focused learning material for novices like pupils and students to learn tree-building self-directed and efficiently.