Upper secondary and first-year university students’ explanations of animal behaviour: to what extent are Tinbergen’s four questions about causation, ontogeny, function and evolution, represented?

ABSTRACT

In 1963, the Nobel Prize-winning ethologist Niko Tinbergen proposed a framework for the scientific study of animal behaviour by outlining four questions that should be answered to have a complete understanding: causation, ontogeny, function and evolution. At present, Tinbergen’s framework is still considered the best way to guide animal behavioural research. Given the importance in science instruction of demonstrating how scientists work and ask questions, we investigated to what extent Tinbergen’s questions are addressed in biology textbooks in secondary education in Flanders, Belgium, and represented in upper-secondary and first-year university students’ explanations of behaviour in general and of specific animal behaviours. Our results revealed that teaching of animal behaviour mainly addresses ontogeny and causation, and that Tinbergen’s framework is not explicitly referred to. Students typically addressed only one or two questions, with the majority addressing causation or both causation and ontogeny when explaining behaviour in general, but function or causation and function when explaining specific animal behaviours. This high prevalence of function may be due to teleological thinking. Evolution was completely neglected, even in university students who had recently completed an evolution course. Our results revealed that transfer of the concepts of ontogeny and evolution was (almost) absent. We argue why Tinbergen’s framework should be an integral part of any biology curriculum.

KEYWORDS:

• Animal behaviour education
• Tinbergen’s four questions
• secondary education
• knowledge transfer

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to all the participating students and to the student biology teachers who administered the open-response questionnaires. We also wish to thank three anonymous reviewers for their constructive suggestions and Josie Meany-Ward for contributing with language suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCiD

Rianne Pinxten http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5686-3284

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported financially by the Institute of Instructional and Educational Sciences, University of Antwerp.