"Disgusting" Animals: Primary School Children's Attitudes and Myths of Bats and Spiders

By P. Prokop, S. Tunnicliffe. 2008

224 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/78850c6a0815928ac63dc24e2ce92b4a3464ca61

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Citations in the corpus

What Plants and Animals Do Early Childhood and Primary Students’ Name? Where Do They See Them? (2011, unknown): “Additionally, they have personal interactions with animals as pets (Prokop and Tunnicliffe 2008) and as livestock, which are kept for meat, milk, eggs, honey, and transport.”
High School Students’ Attitudes Towards Spiders: A cross‐cultural comparison (2010, methodology): “As far as we are aware, only Prokop and Tunnicliffe (2008) have examined attitudes towards spiders in three attitude dimensions (ecoscientistic, negativistic, and naturalistic) as well as knowledge of these animals and myths about them.”
‘Love honey, hate honey bees’: reviving biophilia of elementary school students through environmental education program (2018, background): “Therefore, it is essential for children to have a chance to directly experience and appreciate the priceless values of nature (Prokop and Tunnicliffe 2008).”
Cute, Creepy, or Crispy—How Values, Attitudes, and Norms Shape Human Behavior Toward Bats (2016, background): “Unfortunately, fear (Prokop et al. 2009) and disgust for bats (Prokop and Tunnicliffe 2008) are widespread.”
Attitudes toward Animals among Kindergarten Children: Species Preferences (2015, background): “Previous studies have shown that in children and adolescents a preference for familiar species (such as domestic animals) over wild species is already present, as well as negative feelings toward invertebrates and animals evoking fear (Bjerke, Odegardstuen and Kaltenborn 1998b; Prokop and tunnicliff”
Cross-Cultural Comparison of Student Attitudes toward Snakes (2009, methodology): “Second, pet-keepers—at least in Slovakia—have more educated parents compared to their non-pet-keeping counterparts (Prokop, Prokop, & Tunnicliff e, 2008).”