Plants are often overlooked both in educational settings and everyday life, the extreme form of this being the phenomenon of 'plant blindness' which hinders scientific progress. This issue is caused by several factors, but changes in education seem to be a good starting point in resolving it. In this research, we decided to focus on legumes since their dietary and industrial uses make their relevance easier to understand for children and the general public. The goal of our research was to assess the knowledge and attitudes of elementary school students towards legumes and to determine which factors affect their opinion. We designed a questionnaire which was answered by sixth and ninth grade pupils from two Slovenian schools (N=206). Part of the questionnaire were also seeds of 8 legume species, whose recognition by pupils was tested. We found that their knowledge was poor (37,6 % correct answers with 22,4 % of the pupils recognising at least four out of the eight selected species) and that their living environment, gender and age have no significant effects on the results. Considering the results from studies investigating attitudes towards plants in general and based on our results, we suggest to adapt education approach to elicit interest towards and acceptance of plants as this will broaden the pupils' horizons and enhance their ability to make healthy decisions later in life.
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