MISCONCEPTIONS OF MASS EXTINCTIONS: DIFFERENCES BETWEEN SCIENCE AND NON-SCIENCE MAJORS

In the ROMME Project, we are identifying various misconceptions regarding mass extinctions. For the past three years we have administered an open-ended questionnaire to students taking an Earth History course and asked them to describe what they know about mass extinctions. This course is required for all Earth Science and Environmental Science majors and a popular option for biology majors. Some of the biology majors had not completed an introductory geology course. Previous work has shown that students from this course hold a variety of beliefs including the unexpected belief that all organisms (even bacteria) die during a mass extinction.

In this phase of our pilot study, we continued collecting data from the Earth History course, but also asked 28 students taking an introductory art class to also complete the questionnaire. These students were primarily art majors or taking it to satisfy their fine arts graduation requirement. None of the students in the art course were science majors.

When asked about the number of extinctions and the causes of mass extinctions, the non-science majors were more likely to hold inaccurate beliefs than their peers majoring in science. For the number of mass extinctions, 34% of the non-science majors stated that one mass extinction has occurred (the dinosaurs), but only 6% of the science majors gave that response. Similarly, 0% of the non-science majors correctly stated that 5 or 6 mass extinctions have occurred, but 34% of the science majors gave the correct response. (We accepted 5 or 6 as correct because some students included the current anthropic extinction event.) For causes, a majority of student from both groups listed changes in climate as a cause, but 25% on the non-science majors and 39% of the science majors listed asteroid/meteorite impacts as the cause. The science majors were heavily influenced by the large number of biology majors taking Earth History. Most were juniors or seniors and had taken several courses that emphasized evolution as a foundational concept. Given this background, it is no surprise that many of the science majors in this study conflated global mass extinctions with local or species-specific extinctions.

These findings demonstrate the need for a wider dissemination of our instrument across different demographic groups.