A Christian Guide to High School Biology

Many Christian high school biology teachers want to give their students a rigorous, thorough understanding of biology—including evolution—and at the same time help them deepen their Christian faith. Unfortunately, they too often fall short of attaining this goal: studies in biology education have documented the poor quality of evolution instruction in faith-based schools (Moore and Carter, 2013) and about 1 in 4 young people who leave the church do so because they feel “Christianity is anti-science” (Kinnaman, 2011). Currently Christian school teachers and home school parents must choose between Christian-published curricula, written from a Young Earth Creationist or Intelligent Design perspective, and secular curricula, which offer no Christian worldview guidance. To address this disconnect, we propose to create a modular online Christian worldview supplement, written from the Evolutionary Creation perspective, to be used alongside secular curricula for high school biology. The project proposed here will partially fund the development and dissemination of a curriculum supplement containing 15-20 instructional units on a wide variety of topics. Each unit will include accessible background material, student activities, and suggestions for further engagement. To aid teachers in a variety of classroom contexts, we will align the units to the chapters of one or more secular biology textbooks. Our dissemination strategy includes promotion at large education conventions, a series of teacher training events, and articles or a printed booklet designed to introduce the resource to parents, administrators, and school board members. By emphasizing curiosity, wonder, and humility, and by addressing students’ concerns, this resource will help Christian young people develop a deeper love and stronger understanding of the world God has made. We expect this positive engagement will lead to greater mastery of scientific practices, crosscutting concepts and core ideas in biology.