Teachers’ and Their Pupils’ Performance on Plant Nutrition: a Comparative Case

The research compares teachers’ and their pupils’ performance on plant nutrition. The misconceptions of 89 primary school children from one state school have been compared with those of their four teachers. A questionnaire and a drawing task were used for data collection. The results evidence that children and teachers have serious shortcomings regarding plant nutrition, although they do not always coincide, diverging from common assumptions held by scientific literature. Results have implications for teacher training program design, suggesting that it is important to provide pre-service teachers with a deeper content knowledge and strategies that allow them to detect misconceptions and deal with them successfully in the classroom.