Quality of learning community and presentations task: investigating student’s discourse of the celestial objects coordinates in astronomy to construct scientific reasoning

Abstract

The discussion of celestial body coordinates in astronomy requires scientific understanding and reasoning to view the concept of the celestial sphere. Students often have a complicated knowledge of the visualization of the celestial sphere through lectures in class. This initial study was carried out through observing the quality of student presentations in the category as the assignment product given by the lecturer. Small group discussion design to explore prior knowledge of students about the content of celestial body coordinates and review students’ understanding. The method of this study is pre-experimental design in the form of one group pretest-posttest design consistof 32 teacher candidates teacher divided into eight small groups. Analysis of the discussion of video recording shows an increase in students’ scientific reasoning on aspects of the ability to explain content through presentation tasks and investigating the concept of celestial body coordinates through the learning community. The significant scientific reasoning increases the quality of presentations is proven in the presentationsystematic and presentation content. A good quality presentation requires an adequate source of material investigation and prior knowledge based on the scientific conception of celestial body coordinates.