Moving from Basic Evolutionary Facts to Evolutionary Thinking

Often, teachers and students focus on instructional objectives, such as definitions, formulas, algorithms, or case studies, presented during lectures. However, teachers should also aim at higher-level educational objectives that lead to long-lasting learning. A way to do it is to organize instructional objectives into a cognitive network that addresses higher cognitive skills. I suggest five organizing elements that facilitate a progression from mere assimilation of evolutionary facts to a broader, independent evolutionary thinking: entities, patterns, mechanisms, kinds of questions, and scales. The identification of organizing elements or principles is a mighty tool to empower students so that they can go beyond basic facts and harness their own learning. They provide: (1) a basis for reaching educational and global objectives in the learning of evolutionary biology and (2) metacognitive tools that facilitate learning how to learn.