Abstract
In this paper, we report about the development and validation of a learning progression about the Celestial Motion big idea. Existing curricula, research studies on alternative conceptions about these phenomena, and students’ answers to an open questionnaire were the starting point to develop initial learning progressions about change of seasons, solar and lunar eclipses, and Moon phases; then, a two-tier multiple choice questionnaire was designed to validate and improve them. The questionnaire was submitted to about 300 secondary students of different school levels (14 to 18 years old). Item response analysis and curve integral method were used to revise the hypothesized learning progressions. Findings support that spatial reasoning is a key cognitive factor for building an explanatory framework for the Celestial Motion big idea, but also suggest that causal reasoning based on physics mechanisms underlying the phenomena, as light flux laws or energy transfers, may significantly impact a students’ understanding. As an implication of the study, we propose that the teaching of the three discussed astronomy phenomena should follow a single teaching-learning path along the following sequence: (i) emphasize from the beginning the geometrical aspects of the Sun-Moon-Earth system motion; (ii) clarify consequences of the motion of the Sun-Moon-Earth system, as the changing solar radiation flow on the surface of Earth during the revolution around the Sun; (iii) help students moving between different reference systems (Earth and space observer’s perspective) to understand how Earth’s rotation and revolution can change the appearance of the Sun and Moon. Instructional and methodological implications are also briefly discussed.9 MoreReceived 27 September 2014DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevSTPER.11.020102This article is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.Published by the American Physical Society
Highlights
Research in science education increasingly advocates the use of a learning progression approach to describe and interpret how students develop their understanding of a given concept across school levels [1,2,3,4]
Quantitative considerations about Celestial Motion are added between the third and fifth year (16–18 years) in the mathematics and physics subjects “With the study of Newtonian gravitation and of the Kepler’s laws, the student may deepen the knowledge about cosmological systems
From the previous studies, we chose to validate the initial learning progressions focusing on the Italian curricular instruction about the chosen topics, as done by Neumann and colleagues [13]
Summary
Research in science education increasingly advocates the use of a learning progression approach to describe and interpret how students develop their understanding of a given concept across school levels [1,2,3,4]. In a developmental view of learning, students learn a given science content starting from their intuitive ideas and progress through subsequent cognitive levels of a more sophisticated understanding of the topic [5,6,7,8]. Learning progressions are usually built around “big ideas” in science [9,10], namely, “core” concepts that help students connect different phenomena, empirical laws, and explanatory models [11]. Students’ initial ideas are “progressively refined, elaborated, and extended” [2] towards a more complete understanding.
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