Native Plant Naming by High-School Students of Different Socioeconomic Status: Implications for Botany Education.

ABSTRACTPeople’s diminished awareness of plants, affected by anthropogenic environmental deterioration, has challenged science education to overcome the obstacles impeding a better understanding of their meaning and value. The aim of this study was to investigate the influence of the socioeconomic status of high-school students, as indicated by their attendance at private or state schools, on their knowledge of native plants. In total, 321 students aged 15–18 were asked to write down 10 plants native to Cordoba, Argentina, in a freelist questionnaire. Students listed a mean of 6.8 species of a total of 165 different categories of plant names. The majority of the species named were exotic to Cordoba (63%) or Argentina (50.6%, of which 33.8% were adventitious), indicating an ‘adventitious-to-native’ effect by which all spontaneously reproducing plants were presumed to be native species. However, the 20 most frequently named plants were mainly native, with ‘Algarrobo’ (Prosopis spp.) and ‘Espinillo’ (Vachell...