I have some major concerns about Bryan Leonard's main research question:
"When students are taught the scientific data both supporting and challenging macroevolution, do they maintain or change their beliefs over time? What empirical, cognitive and/or social factors influence students' beliefs?"
In my opinion, any public school science teacher who puts his focus on his students' beliefs rather than their understandings is seriously misguided. Our job is not to impact what our students believe. We are expected to help them understand what science has to say about how the the natural world works. Their personal beliefs about what they learn in science class are irrelevant.
"What empirical, cognitive and/or social factors influence students' beliefs?"
Ah, yes. Leonard is studying how to deceive students. He seems to be trying to deceive his dissertation committee as well. Good to know that someone is questioning his ethics in the matter.
Any bets on whether or not Leonard had his research methodology approved by an appropriate research ethics committee?
Right. Leonard is teaching them what evidence that disproves evolution? Dembski's psuedo-scientific statistical models? I doubt high school students are going to be able to see through all the technical jargon and BS to the truth. This is a travesty.
Judging from the model lesson plan that Leonard wrote for the Ohio State Board of Education, he's not teaching Dembski, but rather is using Wells's "Icons of Evolution", a compendium of crap, as his primary source. Eight of the nine so-called "challenges" to evolution in Leonard's draft model lesson plan were straight out of Wells.
RBH
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