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Embedding change agent individuals within STEM departments may drive instructional and pedagogical change efforts. This study seeks to assess whether tenure-track, teaching-focused faculty housed in STEM departments are perceived as influential on the instructional and pedagogical domains of their colleagues. 

Abstract Background Instructors can teach evolution using any number of species contexts. However, not all species contexts are equal, and taxa choice can alter both cognitive and affective elements of learning. This is particularly true when teaching evolution using human examples, a promising method for evolution instruction that nevertheless comes with unique challenges. In this study, we tested how an evolution lesson focused on a human example may impact students’ engagement, perceived content relevance, learning gains, and level of discomfort, when compared to the same lesson using a non-human mammal example. We use this isomorphic lesson and a pre-post study design administered in a split-section introductory biology classroom to isolate the importance of the species context. Results For two of the four measurements of interest, the effect of using human examples could not be understood without accounting for student background. For learning gains, students with greater pre-class content knowledge benefited more from the human examples, while those with low levels of knowledge benefited from the non-human example. For perceived relevance, students who were more accepting of human evolution indicated greater content relevance from the human example. Regardless of condition, students with lower evolution acceptance reported greater levels of discomfort with the lesson. Conclusions Our results illustrate the complexities of using human examples to teach evolution. While these examples were beneficial for many students, they resulted in worse outcomes for students that were less accepting of evolution and those who entered the course with less content knowledge. These findings demonstrate the need to consider diverse student backgrounds when establishing best practices for using human examples to teach evolution. 

Teaching evolution using medical examples can be a particularly effective strategy for motivating students to learn evolutionary principles, especially students interested in pursuing medical and allied health careers. Research in the area of evolutionary medicine has expanded the number of ways in which evolution informs health and disease, providing many new and less widely known contexts that can be adopted for classroom use. However, many instructors do not have time to locate or create classroom materials about evolutionary medicine. To address this need, we have created EvMedEd, a resource repository to help instructors who want to integrate more medical examples into their evolution instruction or instructors who are teaching a course on evolutionary medicine. Some resources are designed to be more appropriate for a high school or introductory biology audience, whereas others are more advanced. We encourage instructors to access this curated website and to share their own teaching materials with this community.