Ecological and Evolutionary Applications in Education: A Review of the Literature

Undergraduate Honors Thesis

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Citeable URL: https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/undergraduate_honors_theses/zw12z683z

Abstract

What exactly constitutes the field of ecology and what does not has been the subject ofconsiderable debate. Non-ecological sciences have used ecology concepts to attempt to parsevarious complex systems, but these attempts have not all been similarly rigorous. To betterunderstand the use of ecology applications in education, a review of relevant literature wasperformed. ERIC and Mendeley were searched with a variety of keywords, and a rigorousprocess was used to select peer-reviewed literature that applied some aspect of ecology to thestudy of education. Syntheses of these results coalesced around three frameworks. Institutionalnetworks between schools, role-networks in classrooms, and knowledge-networks in minds werecharacterized as ecosystems of different scales. The third framework, wherein curricula andconcepts were distinct species competing for niches in the minds of students, was recommendedfor further research, as it had the greatest potential for improving theories of education.

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