From caterpillar to butterfly: a window for looking into students’ ideas about life cycle and life forms of insects

Abstract

The purpose of this study was a qualitative analysis of high school students’ ideas about life cycle and life forms of the butterfly. For this purpose, open-ended questions and drawing methods were applied to 194 high school students from the ninth to eleventh grades and 14 to 16 years of age in Erzurum, Turkey. Students’ drawings were categorised using a five-level coding framework and the frequencies of drawn external organs (elements) were calculated; open-ended responses were also evaluated and interpreted. The results indicated that many students have a wide range of misconceptions. These misconceptions could be attributed to results of the students’ naive experiences and/or insufficient emphasis of the Turkish primary and secondary biology curriculum on the phenomenon of metamorphosis. Some students were able to identify the morphological structure of a butterfly and caterpillar, but had difficulty classifying them and describing how the transformation from a caterpillar to a butterfly works and what this process is. Students used different concepts to define the phenomenon of metamorphosis such as evolution, growing up, development, mutation or adaptation.