Evolutionary Attitudes and Literacy Survey

The Evolutionary Attitudes and Literacy Survey (EALS) is a standardized survey designed to test political, spiritual, and general attitudes about evolution, as well as factual knowledge of the theory. This survey can be used as a measure of curricular effectiveness of evolutionary courses in higher education–and by extension, to evaluate the need for or effectiveness of an EvoS Program at your institution.

For the EALS (Evolutionary Attitudes and Literacy Survey; Hawley et al., 2009), please follow the steps below:

  1. Consider administering the survey yourself. To this end, Pat Hawley will send you an article that contains all items and the item structures, or access it yourself here.
  2. If you do not want to administer the survey yourself, reflect on the following questions.
    1. Do you simply want to assess the outcomes of your class for your own information? If so, your Human Subjects Committee may not require project approval, and may even allow you to collect participant names if you wish to tie the assessment to grade outcomes.
    2. Do you want to assess the outcomes of your class for possible publication/research purposes? Full HSC approval is absolutely necessary for this, and in all likelihood, subjects will need to be protected with code names, etc.
      1. In this case, you will need to work with your HSC board for approved codename protocol.
      2. Please keep in mind that you probably want to collect Time 1 and Time 2 data. Therefore, the codename procedure should be such that students can replicate their codenames from T1 to T2. Be aware, there will be some data loss at this step, no matter how careful you are in codename derivation.
      3. The board may also require you to provide an additional cover letter (in addition to Pat Hawley’s already at the top of the survey) from your institution. Following your institution’s guidelines is your responsibility, not Pat Hawley’s or the University of Kansas. Please do your homework.
  3. You have reflected on the above questions, and now you would like to proceed with the support of KU.
    1. Gather the course names, the course numbers, and instructor names.
    2. Contact Pat Hawley and provide all the information above together with your T1 target date.
    3. E-nudge her if you have to when you get down to the wire!
  4. Contact Pat Hawley again when you would like to collect T2 data at the time of T2 data collection.
  5. After sufficient time for data collection, contact Pat Hawley again for the data. She will email you an excel file.

Reference:

Hawley, P. H., Short, S. D., McCune, L. A., Osman, M. R., & Little, T. D. (2010). What’s the matter with Kansas?: The development and confirmation of the evolutionary attitudes and literacy survey (EALS) Evolution, Education and Outreach.

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