The importance of biology education is increasing in today's time since knowledge of biology occupies a large share of every individual's personal and social life. Biotic diversity can be considered as one of the essential curricular topics as knowledge of these topics influences students' awareness of environmental issues and species conservation. However, many students' alternative conceptions appear for mentioned topics because pupils relate their explanations to their own experiences, own interests, and characteristics of organisms that seem to determine the organism most. At school, pupils show more interest in animals than plants, as animals are with their way of life and movement more interesting than plants. Smaller differences between animals and plants can be found for many marine organisms, leading to more alternative conceptions of students. Alternative conceptions are limiting students' understanding and classification of plant and animal species. Furthermore, this can hinder students' acquisition of new knowledge, understanding of concepts, and forming attitudes and values regarding biological and environmental issues.
Our research aimed to determine how successful pupils are in the classification of marine organisms among animals and plants and what reasons they list for their decisions. We were above all interested in wrong concepts about sea organisms.
The research has been performed at one primary school based in Gorenjska region. Students' of the sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth grades, in total 191 pupils, were included in the research. We used quantitative research, namely an anonymous questionnaire, that pupils were filling over a computer.
The research showed that students have no difficulty in classifying well-known and seemingly recognizable organisms, such as the brown algae Fucus virsoides, common cuttlefish, an octopus, common bottlenose dolphin, and seagrass. Several problems occurred for animals that do not have the typical anatomy for a particular group of animals (e.g. sea lily - echinoderms). In the part where we were determining students' ability to name the organism based on a photo, we concluded that most students correctly name a seagrass, starfish, shellfish, jellyfish, and red sea anemone, a dolphin, and a shark. However, we got the least correct names for a Mediterranean fanworm, sea pen, and sea lily. These animals are sessile organisms, which is a key reason for misnaming, as students have associated them with already known plants.
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