Absolutely, with qualifications. Young children, even as young as three or four (once they have language), begin to grasp concepts and are even curious about them. Children, just like you and I, grasp what they can. Their ability to add complexity grows relative to the availability and relevance of a concept in their lives. And stories are great ways to introduce concepts. Evolution is a perfect subject for young children, and they will take it as far and as fast as you can communicate it. Last caveat: teaching, as it has been taught via academic institutions, can make learning difficult. To quote John Holt, "Learning is a productive of the activity of the learner," not necessarily the activity of the teacher.

Bruner posited that any concept can be taught to young children with integrity. Frankly, if they can do religious concepts, they can do this. Young children exist in a world of complex abstract concepts and ambiguous realities. They cope with Father Christmas, Jesus and Mohammed all in the same term. Before they are seven, the new curriculum demands they understand monarchy, democracy, war and peace. All these are more abstract than evolution!!!

Jane I think you may have misunderstood me. I am not arguing that Evolution is an abstract concept, it isn't it's actually relatively straightforward when you have the prerequisites to understanding it--but that's my point! Likewise my question has nothing to do with the efficacy of the National Curriculum, current or otherwise. My issue is that evolution IS a complex concept. My own research is looking into children's conceptual development within Science Education and while research has shown that children are able to vaguely grasp micro-evolutionary concepts such as inheritance and adaptation, they cannot understand this in any broader or coherent sense without 1) further teaching of genetics and macro-evolutionary concepts such as speciation and domestication and 2) a more developed cognitive capacity in order to deal with these higher-order concepts, (a major one being the dimensionality of time which a lot of research has shown children find very difficult up until adolescence). The same of course goes for the abstract concepts you mention with regards to point 2: Do children have the cognitive tools (e.g. working memory etc...) to hold multiple and complex ideas in their heads while making use of past (and sometimes equally complex) logically connected ideas? This is what I question. Perhaps to some degree they do, as Marty says above, they'll make use of whatever cognitive tools they have... It's all definitely food for thought.

Yes, time is a problem (and lunchtime doubly so) but I think that young children do have the cognitive tools to deal with evolution. Not, perhaps, in the way you and I deal with it, and they may need to revisit the whole area as their world experience and congnitive mucles develop, but this is true of any area of the curriculum and at least evolution has an underpinning paradigm and set of assumptions which can be examined. It may be that really understanding the time aspect of evolution is not the first priority. This view does mean that they will need teachers who can structure their engagement with these ideas and iunderstand enough to be able to identify children's miconceptions and, therefore, the ways they are thinking.

Yes, in my experience and study, the question is not "do they have the cognitive ability but rather, "does the environment nurture its development": can they freely discuss, play with, see examples, without fear of failing, being publicly embarrassed, not passing exams, etc. Great question.

This question has really got me thinking and, although I don't have any doubt that the children can address evolution at some level, it raises the question of whether the teachers will be confident and well informed enough. It is not enough for them to watch the TV and learn from nature programmes. Zayba points out some issues that the teachers really need to engage with if they are to guide young learners.

I am sorry but I must be missing something... I discussed evolution with my daughter when she was five years old and she appears to have the cognitive ability to understand. Maybe the language used by some teachers may not explain the concept in the terms the children need to grasp the basics before going on to the higher level concepts. I have not tried to explain the mechanisms of evolution as I understand them. There are a number of myths and misconceptions mainly stemming from confusion with other creation myths

Exactly! You will probably discuss evolution with her a number of times as she gets older and as it relates to a variety of areas of interest in her life. As she gets older and gets more life experience she will need to know more and want to engage with more detail. At the same time, that experience will go hand in hand with development which will give her the capacity to deal with more, make links with existing understandings and enquire further. Isn't learning a miracle? It is important, of course, to realize that a child who discusses big ideas with a parent is at an advantage over one who does not. There is nothing like real personal attention from someone who cares, to make big ideas interesting, relevant and worth pursuing. A teacher has 30 children and cannot have the same relationship. Not all parents engage with evolution.

Pedagogical efficacy demands that all concepts be introduced in a developmentally appropriate way. The theory of evolution is no more or less complex than other learning objectives in the early education curriculum. The ultimate success of teaching and learning hinges on the ability of the curriculum and the classroom teacher to expertly translate ideas into intellectually digestible pieces. To help the students to construct meaning and connections. I don't think that there are many early education concepts more abstract than the theory of evolution. As someone has mentioned, teacher training and professional development is always important. Teachers who rely on television programs to gain insight into curriculum concepts are always at a serious disadvantage, as are their students, I suppose. Teacher training and professional development in my building happens on a more sophisticated level than, "to watch the TV and learn from nature programmes". The key is developmental appropriateness. At the lower depth of knowledge levels in the teaching of this concept would be ideas such as simple biological competition or maybe even some simple Punnett Square activities.

This is an empirical question, and there is a literature on children's and adults' understandings and beliefs about evolution by natural selection vs. other (religious) stories about origins of species. Do a GoogleScholar search on key words; look for work by Deb Kelemen, Margaret Evans, and others. Note that there's also research in the education literature on college students' and teachers' misunderstandings about the theory of evolution by natural selection. The bottom line (across multiple studies) is that a large proportion of college-educated (or in-college) adults do not have an accurate basic understanding of the theory. Perhaps not unrelated is evidence that a substantial minority of high school biology instructors in the US do not teach (or, in many cases, believe in) evolution by natural selection. Note also that "educated" adults in the US are less likely than adults in other developed countries to believe in evolution.

I agree with many of the comments on the level of complexity that a child is capable of understanding will depend on such factors as their "intelligence" or cognitive ability and the level of prior knowledge of the concepts being introduced. If the concept is reduced to the level the child is capable of grasping then that child will understand very complex concepts after incremental instruction. In English language teaching there is various theories such as zone of proximal development which basically says that it is only possible to teach the next stage after the previous stage has been acquired. This of course presupposes that the teacher has acquired the required knowledge to teach the concept correctly. I have seen research on the level of Americans who either do not believe in evolution or have misunderstood the theory to the point that their understanding is completely different from the Darwinian theory.

I have found that children are quite capable of understanding a wide range of concepts and will ask questions about complex and abstract ideas that are beyond my ability to explain at their current cognitive ability but a "because it is" will not develop a further understanding and may deter their curiosity which what appears to be true of the people in the studies mentioned by Gedeon in the previous comment.

Jyotsna thank you for your comments, you and I are in complete agreement and just by looking at the proposed new curriculum it strikes me that teaching macro-evolutionary concepts such as speciation at age 10 is likely to cause fundamental misconceptions. Not at least because inheritance and genetics are taught at later stages. So how are children meant to understand a broad idea without previously understanding its sub-components to explain it? My own recent research has shown children don’t quite get it, they get as far as adaptation to the environment but even inheritance concepts seem to cause some confusion among older children (age 10/11) as they don’t quite understand the mechanisms behind it.

As for why evolution is now being taught at an earlier age, I cannot say. An interesting question though…

In my opinion and experience, children have the ability to grasp every and any concept as long as it is pitched at the right level and teachers possess the skill and subject knowledge to foster such learning. It starts with the design of the curriculum to ensure an adequate level of progression and incremental build up of the knowledge requisite to understanding the broader concept later on.

A second and important aspect is teachers' subject knowledge. Question is how many primary school teachers have even the most basic understanding of the theory? Introducing such a concept would require teacher education which i'm afraid the system hasn't got the capacity for. In the previous regime where the LEAs run the schools, it was easier to organise such development for teachers in the schools but i'm afraid schools are more isolated these days and simple scale economics will prevent such courses in many schools. Furthermore, since science was dropped from the SATs testing schedule in year 6, the unspoken fact is the dropping of science standards in primary schools.

An example if the subject knowledge issue is what happened with the teaching of grammer. Because there was a large generation of teachers who were not taught grammer in their time as pupils and students, their lack of subject knowledge translated to poor teaching of grammar in schools that the current government is trying to fix.

To sum it, I believe children have the cognitive ability to grasp the concept; the problem is whether the adults running education are in the position to make it possible for them to.

I don't think that evolutionary theory is especially difficult to grasp. If explained well, it's a simple armchair deduction. It's not really that complex: a few simple premises and one logical conclusion. The problem, I suppose, is that many people don't explain it very well. The only real question might be: how effective will teachers be at describing it? Perhaps with a well thought out, standardized explanation with visuals and easy to follow examples developed to aid children along with the core concepts, it will actually be quite effective. I'm actually quite pleased with England for this decision. :) The more science in the schools, the better, and this is a particularly important theory for thinking more rationally about the world around oneself (e.g., it closes some of the doors that religion often sneaks though).

You might be interested in the work of Craig Holdrege, PhD, for example his work on the giraffe. http://www.amazon.com/The-Giraffes-Long-Neck-Evolutionary/dp/0974490636

James R. Schmidt is right. Evolution is not difficult to grasp. A preschool child can grasp the concept of a T-rex and be taught that it no longer exists today, but has constantly grown out of its older forms into it becomes a lizard of today. I have tried that experiment on my four grandchildren with the same successful results.