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Elementary students' responses to questions about plant identification: Response strategies in children
Author(s) -
Tull Delena
Publication year - 1994
Publication title -
science education
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.209
H-Index - 115
eISSN - 1098-237X
pISSN - 0036-8326
DOI - 10.1002/sce.3730780402
Subject(s) - ignorance , wildflower , plant identification , set (abstract data type) , class (philosophy) , identification (biology) , trips architecture , psychology , science education , mathematics education , variety (cybernetics) , tree (set theory) , biology , computer science , ecology , mathematics , botany , artificial intelligence , mathematical analysis , philosophy , epistemology , parallel computing , programming language
Nine sixth‐grade students were asked to identify plants seen in a set of slides and examined in two outdoor field trips. When the students did not know the correct common name for a plant (e.g., oak, dandelion), they relied on a variety of response strategies to deal with their lack of knowledge. Three patterns of response emerged when students lacked knowledge of names for plants. Student responses may represent avoidance strategies: avoidance of admission of ignorance, avoidance of being wrong, or avoidance of giving a name more abstract than the common name (e.g., tree, wildflower). These strategies did not result in names that would be acceptable to a science teacher, but the strategies had the effect of hiding the students' lack of knowledge or preventing a “wrong” answer. The study demonstrated that students prefer to identify plants at the generic level (e.g., calling a plant oak rather than tree), which suggests that elementary students should be introduced to the concept of genus (e.g., oak, lily) before being introduced to the more abstract levels of the botanical classification scheme (e.g., class monocot, dicot). © 1994 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.