Probing high school students’ perceptions of the concept of species: a semantic network analysis approach

ABSTRACT

Even though the concept of species is central in biology, the history of species concept and the existence of different species concepts are rarely discussed in biology classroom. This is unfortunate, as teachers could use the plurality of species concepts to enrich discussion in the classroom. Therefore, knowing the students’ perception of species is essential to plan compatible strategies for teaching species. An open-ended question was administered to 548 high school students. A semantic network analysis was then used to explore the ideas of species in the students’ responses, and further analyses were conducted to observe the co-existence of those ideas. The following five concepts were found: species as the lowest taxon in taxonomy (A1), species as a type of animal or plant (A2), species as the basic classification of living things (A3), genetic species concept (A4), and morphological species concept (A5). Of the five species concepts, naïve ideas were more frequent among responses, and some of them co-existed with normative ideas. As students mainly learn the concept of species through biology instruction, in this study, we have discussed the implications of our results for biology teaching and learning.

KEYWORDS:

• High school students
• co-existence of ideas
• network analysis
• species concept
• species pluralism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea [Grant Number: NRF-2017R1D1A1B03035881].