When it comes to the teaching, learning and assessment of science, research across a variety of domains has shown that context makes a difference. More specifically regarding evolutionary biology, prior research has demonstrated students’ knowledge and naive ideas about evolution vary depending on the specific contextual features of assessment items (Nehm and Ha 2011). While such studies shed light on the issue of contextuality in evolution education, they have only investigated those issues within populations of biology students, teachers and experts. Yet this narrow scope ignores alternative disciplines, like physical anthropology, that also use evolutionary theory as their framework. Physical anthropology provides students with a case study exploration of evolution situated within the context of humans, which could provide various cognitive advantages for reasoning about evolution. Furthermore, if students’ knowledge representations are situated within the context of their learning (e.g., Anderson, Reder, and Simon 1996, Barsalou 2009, Greeno 1997, Kirsh 2009), then an alternative approach to learning evolutionary theory could result in different reasoning patterns about evolutionary change. Despite these potential advantages to learning and teaching of human evolution and the insight investigations into such learning and teaching could provide, the effect of human context on student understanding has not been studied empirically. To address this gap in the literature on evolution education, this dissertation aimed to explore physical anthropology student understanding of evolution and compare this to the understanding of commonly used biology student populations. By doing so, a new population will be incorporated into the literature and provide insight on the effect of context on student reasoning patterns. Three studies examining student explanations of evolutionary change, performance on a multiple-choice test of natural selection knowledge and acceptance of evolutionary theory were conducted. The first study investigated introductory physical anthropology students’ reasoning patterns of nonhuman evolutionary change and compared these patterns to those found in comparable introductory biology student populations. Both samples of students demonstrated similar patterns of concept use in their responses, particularly regarding the key concepts and both students had equivalent levels of acceptance of evolutionary theory. Biology students used more key concepts and fewer naive ideas across items compared to anthropology students, though this is likely due to their advanced knowledge and experience of evolution. Nonetheless, when all other factors were held constant, anthropology students have a higher probability of using certain key concepts and naive ideas compared to biology students across the items, demonstrating a consistency in response patterns across items differing in contextual features. The second study investigated students’ reasoning patterns of human evolutionary change in the same populations of introductory students as study one. The results from study two suggest anthropology students have a slight advantage in reasoning about human evolutionary change compared to biology students. Anthropology students were able to reason about the loss and gain of traits in humans no differently than in nonhuman taxa, but did show some changes in patterns when asked to reason about familiar versus unfamiliar traits. Additionally, in contrast to what has been documented in the literature (e.g., Clough and Driver 1986, Nehm and Ha 2011), study two found item features to have a greater effect on key concepts than naive ideas.The focus of the third study was to investigate whether patterns of reasoning found in studies one and two were repeated with upper level students from physical anthropology and biology. As expected at higher levels of expertise, both samples of upper level students were able to consistently reason across human and nonhuman contexts and demonstrated some degree of explanatory coherence. While these findings are interesting, it is questionable how generalizable they are considering the small anthropology sample size. Overall, the results found here provide a detailed account of physical anthropology students’ reasoning about evolutionary change. Furthermore, the studies provide insight to areas of situated learning and cognition, the effects of contextuality on student reasoning, transfer and expert-novice reasoning.