Understanding Plant Blindness – Students’ Inherent Interest of Plants in Higher Education

Thom Dallimore,Sven Peter Batke,John Bostock

doi:10.11648/j.jps.20200804.14

Abstract

‘Plant-blindness’ (PB) is the inability to see or notice plants in one’s own environment. There has been growing concerns amongst biologists that PB is becoming an increasing issue in young university students. However, currently we are still lacking detailed quantitative data that would allow us to determine the exact underlying causes for this trend. In order to contribute to our understanding of PB, we aimed to quantify PB in undergraduate university students by deriving a PB score from face-to-face quizzes. A total of 88 undergraduate students in Biology were surveyed. Students were more likely to correctly identify and recognize animals over plants in a series of picture tests. There was a weak positive correlation (p=0.03, r2=0.24) between the students’ awareness of plants in their natural environment and their exposure to plant biology during pre-university schooling. Most students (65.9%) believed that the inclusion of plants within university course contents increased their interest. Within this group, 30.6% indicated that because of this newly developed interest, they have chosen more relevant plant science modules. These results suggest that there is an inherent interest of plants in students surveyed in this study. However, this interest needs to be carefully nurtured throughout their educational progression. We proposed six areas to combat PB.

Highlights

“Plants look all the same” (Biology undergraduate student, 2019)
The PB score showed no statistical differences between sexes (Table 2), or between students at different degree levels (Table 2); between students that had a garden when they grew up compared to those that did not (Table 2); and students that had parents that were interested in plants compared to those that did not (Table 2)
Most surveyed students in this study believe that since they have started university, they are more aware of plants

Summary

Introduction

“Plants look all the same” (Biology undergraduate student, 2019). The ability of people to perceive and differentiate individuals of the same/or different species, is a fundamental skill that enables people to define and categorise the world around them [1]. Plant-blindness has mostly been attributed to perceptional, cultural and ethnographic factors such as the underrepresentation of plant related content in education [6], differences in people’s visual perception between plants and animals [7], and differences in the exposure to plants at an early age These factors could affect value-based perception towards plants [8]. Plant-blindness Quiz and Questionnaire Design example, in years 4-6 of Stage 2 (age 8-11), there are no specific biology learning outcomes in the curriculum related to plants [14]. At Stage 5 (age 16-18), this trend continues, where most of the plant related teaching focuses again on plant photosynthesis [14] This underrepresentation, and bias of content, taught in many UK schools is concerning, and has been highlighted by the UK Plant Science Federation [17]. All quiz questions included one or two images for the participants to view, before answering a question

Objectives

Results

Conclusion