Teaching Human Evolution

As science educators, we have two goals in writing this paper. The first is to show the importance of teaching human evolution to all students. The second is to provide up-to-date resources for classroom teachers to use in teaching the subject. Secondary biology textbooks suffer from the inherent limitations of mass produced books making it difficult for them to stay current with rapidly changing scientific fields such as paleoanthropology. One of our motives for writing this paper is to compensate for this inherent limitation of textbooks. The most important resource we provide is a review of current scientific research on human evolution that stresses the broad framework of what is reliably known about our origins. To this we have included a list of recommended books taken from our research that we feel are the most useful and accessible. In addition to text resources, we have added a list of web sites on human evolution that provide an increasingly sophisticated source of information. Together, this material should provide teachers with a variety of up-to-date resources for teaching human evolution