How Morocco's Secondary School Students Classify Animals

Abstract

Bringing out the misconceptions is a primordial process in teaching and the learning of biology. This article aims to highlight Moroccan students' alternative conceptions, regarding animal and to elicit their ability to classify some animals. Data was collected using the Animal Classification Test (ACT) distributed at the Moroccan secondary school at the Tangier-Tetouan regional Academy of Education And Training. The results obtained showed that students have real obstacles to classify even most known animals (goose, butterfly, crocodile, etc.). These obstacles are often misconceptions and were poorly treated and reformulated by the teaching-learning process. In fact, many students used “non-taxonomic” criteria, such as habitat and locomotion to classify animals even after learning the categories of the biological taxonomy. In addition, this article finds that high school students have almost the same alternative conceptions about animal classification as the intermediate secondary school. This result confirmed that alternative conceptions are more resistant to change and persist anchored on student's mind even after teaching-learning sequences.