Teacher characteristics influencing plant biology education: age, perception, and practical engagement

Plants are less attractive for students compared to other areas of biology, and teachers may improve this negative scenario. We aimed to investigate the influence of several characteristics of the teacher (e.g. gender, age or technical equipment) on (i) the activity of teaching plant biology, (ii) a number of physiological experiments used in teaching and, (iii) deficiencies in the knowledge of students in plant biology. For this purpose, data were extracted from previous more complex survey and analyzed by General Linear Model. The age, the teachers’ perception of the students’ knowledge and the teachers’ awareness of the importance of the aids significantly correlated with the teachers’ activity in education. Similarly, three teachers’ characteristics (age, school’s equipment and awareness of the importance of the aids) correlated with the number of implemented physiological experiments. In addition, two teachers’ characteristics (age and perception of the students’ knowledge) significantly correlated with the number of identified gaps in students’ knowledge. In particular, we found that 51-yr-old (or above) teachers use more practical activities and physiological experiments, which may be the reason why they identified fewer gaps in students’ knowledge. Therefore, these more active teachers should be replaced by young teachers of the same quality after their retirement to keep the quality of education. Graphical abstract