Abstract
This paper reports on the results from administering a modified version of the Introductory Astronomy Questionnaire (IAQ) to middle school students and preservice science teachers in Norway. Ranking tasks formed a key part of the instrument, and we detail a new method for analyzing ranking task data. One of our main findings was that even after instruction, a significant proportion of students held erroneous views and conceptions regarding sizes, distances, and the nature of basic astronomical entities, such as stars and planets. We argue that the commonalities between some of the issues we identified and those presented in extant studies—from a variety of countries, with samples ranging from junior high school students and undergraduates to primary school teachers—may point to deeper cognitive issues inherent in, and possibly unique to, engaging with astronomy.
Highlights
A challenge all individuals face in acquiring basic knowledge of astronomical objects is that we have skewed, limited, or no direct experience with these objects
This paper reports on the results from administering a modified version of the Introductory Astronomy Questionnaire (IAQ) to middle school students and preservice science teachers in Norway
We argue that the commonalities between some of the issues we identified and those presented in extant studies—from a variety of countries, with samples ranging from junior high school students and undergraduates to primary school teachers—may point to deeper cognitive issues inherent in, and possibly unique to, engaging with astronomy
Summary
A challenge all individuals face in acquiring basic knowledge of astronomical objects is that we have skewed, limited, or no direct experience with these objects. The actual scales of astronomical phenomena and objects lie, almost without exception, far beyond human experience, and the little experience we do have—with Earth, the Sun, the Moon, and stars— provides a skewed starting point for building basic knowledge of these and other astronomical objects. We explore students’ basic knowledge of astronomical objects on scales ranging from telluric (i.e., pertaining to Earth as a planet) to cosmological, focusing primarily on their perspectives of relative sizes and distances. Beyond the general finding that a significant number of students at all levels do not have correct notions of relative sizes of the most well-known objects in the Solar System, it is difficult to compare results across studies because the results are strongly linked to how the questions were asked Summers and Mant [11] asked 120 British primary school teachers to select the most representative MCQ option of relative size of Earth compared to the Sun in a scale model. 87% of the teachers chose one of the five alternatives in which Earth was smaller than the Sun (32% chose the correct option), only 2% chose the equal or larger option, and 12% responded “don’t know.” Beyond the general finding that a significant number of students at all levels do not have correct notions of relative sizes of the most well-known objects in the Solar System, it is difficult to compare results across studies because the results are strongly linked to how the questions were asked
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