The Effect of Preparing a Book About Plants or Visiting a Botanical Garden on Raising Pupils' Plant Awareness.

Plant blindness is defined as the inability to notice plants in one's own environment, recognize their importance for the environment and human beings, appreciate their aesthetic and unique biological features, and the tendency to rank plants as inferior to animals. Many people exhibit symptoms of plant blindness (Wandersee & Schussler, 1999). This study examines the implementation of two instructional strategies and compares the effect of each on students' plant awareness. One of the instructional methods had students prepare a book about plants with interesting characteristics. The other involved a field trip to a botanical garden. Fifty-six students in 6th grade (28 students in each intervention group) participated in the study. A matched-pair design was used in the research, using an open ended questionnaire to gather data. Each item of the questionnaire focused on one symptom of plant blindness and the items in the questionnaire were analysed separately. Frequencies, percentages, and chi-square analyses were used to determine if there were significant differences in the pre- and post-survey responses after each intervention, and if there were significant differences in student responses between the two interventions. Students had significantly higher post-survey plant awareness scores on some but not all survey items after both interventions. There were no significant differences between post-survey scores of the two intervention groups. It was concluded that both teaching interventions (preparing a book about plants with interesting characteristics and taking a field trip to a botanical garden) had similar positive effects and resulted in higher student plant awareness and lower plant blindness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]