Cognitive and affective outcomes of teaching about poisonous and venomous animals

ABSTRACT

The use of live animals in instruction plays an important role in biological education, with the intention that attitudes and emotions should be positively influenced. To date, studies in this field have given mixed results, and there has certainly been a lack of studies on student attitudes and knowledge of poisonous and venomous animals. This study focuses on the effect of the use of poisonous and venomous animals in biology instruction. Two treatment groups of Slovenian seventh and eighth graders (N = 123; age 12.3 and 13.2 years, respectively) were compared. The experimental group (N = 82) was given the opportunity to observe with adequate risk assessment live animal species. The observation of live poisonous and venomous animals led to higher values on different attitudinal dimensions. After instruction, we found no differences between both treatment groups in knowledge. Interest in learning about the different poisonous and venomous animals increased significantly. The level of disgust decreased for the viper, spider, and scorpion. However, ‘fear’ seems to be more stable and less influenceable than ‘disgust’. We recommend that students should be offered as many first-hand experiences with live poisonous and venomous animals as possible mainly through informal learning environments, such as zoos.     

Chinese Traditional Bioethics

Chinese traditional bioethics is based on the life origin theory of “Qi (vital force) permeates everything under heaven”, the attitude towards life theory of “loving people” and “loving things”, and the life transcendence theory of “eternity” and “immortality”. The life origin theory answers the question of how life comes into being, which is the basis for exploring the mystery of life. The attitude towards life theory gives answers to the question of how to treat life properly and establishes the basic requirements and criteria for treating life. The life transcendence theory responds to the question of how to make life more meaningful. Those three thoughts support each other and explain each other with the inner logical band between these three basic thoughts, and tentatively offers a reasonable way for the reconstruction of traditional Chinese bioethics, which can be a special theoretical resource for today's bioethical research.     

An application of the risk perception attitude framework in food safety behavior

An important part of consumers' ability to choose and consume safe food is their level of trust in the information and labeling provided by governments or companies. This study classifies consumers into four groups with similar characteristics regarding food safety issues, using data from the 2016 “Research on Food Consumption Behavior” compiled by the Korea Rural Economic Institute. Using risk perception and efficacy beliefs for food safety, four consumer-type groups were identified: indifference, proactive, avoidance, and responsive. Consumers were classified by applying the risk perception attitude framework, and then the factors that influence the consumer-type classifications were examined. The indifference group accounted for 33.9% of all consumers, the highest percentage, and factors that influenced the classification of consumer types were gender, education level, monthly household income, interest in health, and involvement with food safety. The differences in food safety behaviors proxied by intention to pay higher prices for safe food and checking food labels were identified by consumer type, and these differences were statistically significant.