Probing high school students’ perceptions of the concept of species: a semantic network analysis approach

Even though the concept of species is central in biology, the history of species concept and the existence of different species concepts are rarely discussed in biology classroom. This is unfortunate, as teachers could use the plurality of species concepts to enrich discussion in the classroom. Therefore, knowing the students’ perception of species is essential to plan compatible strategies for teaching species. An open-ended question was administered to 548 high school students. A semantic network analysis was then used to explore the ideas of species in the students’ responses, and further analyses were conducted to observe the co-existence of those ideas. The following five concepts were found: species as the lowest taxon in taxonomy (A1), species as a type of animal or plant (A2), species as the basic classification of living things (A3), genetic species concept (A4), and morphological species concept (A5). Of the five species concepts, naïve ideas were more frequent among responses, and some of them co-existed with normative ideas. As students mainly learn the concept of species through biology instruction, in this study, we have discussed the implications of our results for biology teaching and learning.