“Disgusting” Animals: Primary School Children’s Attitudes and Myths of Bats and Spiders

Abstract

Knowledge of animals may influence children"s beliefs and behaviour toward them, thus building positive attitudes toward animals is one of main goals of environmental education programmes. Although keeping animals contributes to the increase of children"s positive attitudes toward wild animals, pet owners show similar negative attitudes toward less popular animals such as insects, bats or rats than non-pet owners. Moreover, some of these animals are emblazoned with various myths (hereafter alternative conceptions) which may have a negative impact on children"s attitudes toward them. We used a novel approach with two questionnaires with nearly identical items for identifying attitudes to bats and spiders in a sample of primary school participants (N = 196) aged 10 -16 years. Score from each questionnaire was factor analysed and then compared with a pair-wise statistic. Children (especially girls) showed more negative attitudes toward spiders in comparison with bats. Both knowledge and alternative conceptions were distributed randomly irrespective of children"s age or gender. We found a moderate, but significant correlation between alternative conceptions and attitudes, whereas more alternative conceptions resulted in more negative attitudes. Interestingly, the link between attitude and knowledge was found just for bats, but not for spiders perhaps due to greater fear from spiders. Implications of the study for the science education practise are discussed.

Factors Affecting Students’ Attitudes Toward Toads

“…That finding is in line of several previous studies where authors also found that interest in animals decreases over time (Prokop & Tunnicliffe, 2008;Bjerke & Østdahl, 2004, Tomažič, 2011a. Prokop et al (2007) found that Slovakian students' interest about biology decreases over years and linked their results with the topics that students learn about in different grades.…”

“…Species that are usually used in attitude research are either charismatic or flagship species such as dolphins (Barney et al, 2005), primates (Lukas & Ross, 2005), or large carnivores (Majic & Bath, 2010;Prokop, Usak & Erdogan, 2011). One branch of research is about attitudes toward animals that people dislike or fear, like sharks (Thompson & Mintzes, 2002), crows (Špur, Pokorny & Šorgo, 2016), snakes, spiders, and bats (Prokop & Tunnicliffe, 2008Prokop et al, 2009) was conducted. However, attitudes toward amphibians had been, with few exceptions, scarcely researched (Randler et al, 2005;Tomažič, 2008;Tomažič, 2011a;Prokop & Fančovičová, 2012;Reimer et al, 2014;Jimenez & Lindemann-Matthies, 2015a;Jimenez & Lindemann-Matthies, 2015b).…”

A Study on the Spontaneous Representation of Animals in Young Children’s Drawings of Plant Life

“…Previous research also indicates that the depiction of animals is a common attribute of young children's representations of nature [28][29][30]. In addition, it has also been reported that invertebrates may appear in young children's representations of the environment even though this group of animals tend to be misrepresented [31].…”

Pre-Service Biology Teachers’ and Primary School Students’ Attitudes Toward and Knowledge about Snakes

“…Prokop and Tunnicliffe (2008) found a positive association between knowledge of and attitudes toward animals less associated with people's phobias (such as bats), but no similar relationship between knowledge of and attitudes toward animals more associated with phobias (such as spiders). The authors speculate that public awareness is simply unable to improve attitudes toward animals that were associated with danger in human evolutionary history.…”

“…But in recent years, such studies are also turning to animals such as bats, spiders, snakes (Prokop & Tunnicliffe, 2008, 2010Prokop et al, 2009a,b) and amphibians (Randler et al 2005, Tomažič, 2008. All of the mentioned studies encompass both formal and informal aspects of education as their integral feature.…”