It can be concluded that children are very interested in animals. Their ideas of animals irrespective of appearance, reproduction, nourishment, living space, etc. are often different from the researchers’ interpretations.
However, the childrens’ notion about the animal world is very unique. Their perception of the animals was studied in several reasearch, which proved the scientists wrong.
The aim of my masters is thus to reveal the ideas and to find the misconceptions about animals among the pupils of the third and fifth grade of primary school. The research was done on descriptive research approach. There were 62 pupils in the third class and 58 pupils in the fifth class from two Slovene schools involved.
In addition, the pupils were given a questionnaire with seven closed questions offering 21 statements, where children agree, disagree, or are undefined, and 4 opened questions. 27 questions were prepared by me, 6 questions had already been researched. Consequently, I was eager to get the same results. The research was done in eight categories (appearance, production, nutrition, abilities, body parts and their roles, classification, features and living space). The research has shown that children often have misconception of the animals. At least 5 pupils (5 %) know that there’s the same number of chicks hatched as with roosters. Yet a majority of pupils think there’s more chicks. Moreover, there were a lot of problems with the two questions: What a camel keeps in its humps?; Why birds migrate? and the statement, An owl is able to move its head by a circle. Younger childrens’ perception of animals is often wrong compared to older children. Among younger children the girls have better perception of animals than the boys, whereas the boys have better perception among older children. To sum up, boys’ perception of animals are a bit better than the girls’.
Given the above, the childrens’ perception of animals are superficial. Therefore, professionals should foster the nature-based approach in other areas of education and not the science field alone.
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