Janelle M. Bailey

A Review of Astronomy Education Research

The field of astronomy education is rapidly growing beyond merely sharing effective activities or curriculum ideas. This paper categorizes and summarizes the literature in astronomy education research and contains more than 100 references to articles, books, and Web-based materials. Research into student understanding on a variety of topics now occupies a large part of the literature. Topics include the shape of Earth and gravity, lunar phases, seasons, astrobiology, and cosmology. The effectiveness of instructional methods is now being tested systematically, taking data beyond the anecdotal with powerful research designs and statistical analyses. Quantitative, qualitative, and mixed- methods approaches have found their places in the researcher’s toolbox. In all cases, the connection between the research performed and its effect on classroom instruction is largely lacking.

Research on a Lecture-Tutorial Approach to Teaching Introductory Astronomy for Non-Science Majors

The Lecture-Tutorial curriculum development project produced a set of 29 learner-centered classroom instructional materials for a large- enrollment introductory astronomy survey course for non-science majors. The Lecture-Tutorials are instructional materials intended for use by collaborative student learning groups, and are designed to be integrated into existing courses with conventional lectures. These instructional materials offer classroom-ready learner-centered activities that do not require any outside equipment or drastic course revision for implementation. Each 15-minute Lecture-Tutorial poses a sequence of conceptually challenging, Socratic dialogue-driven questions, along with graphs and data tables, all designed to encourage students to reason critically about difficult concepts in astronomy. The materials are based on research into student beliefs and reasoning difficulties, and use proven instructional strategies. The Lecture-Tutorials have been field- tested for effectiveness at various institutions, which represent a wide range of student populations and instructional settings. In addition to materials development, a second effort of this project focused on the assessment of changes in students’ conceptual understanding and attitudes toward learning astronomy as a result of both lecture and the subsequent use of Lecture-Tutorials. Quantitative and qualitative assessments were completed using a precourse,

Do Concept Inventories Actually Measure Anything

Although concept inventories are among the most frequently used tools in the physics and astronomy education communities, they are rarely evaluated using item response theory IRT . When IRT models fit the data, they offer sample-independent estimates of item and person parameters. IRT may also provide a way to measure students’ learning gains that circumvents some known issues with Hake’s normalized gain. In this paper, we review the essentials of IRT while simultaneously applying it to the Star Properties Concept Inventory. We also use IRT to explore an important psychometrics debate that has received too little attention from physics and astronomy education researchers: What do we mean when we say we “measure” a mental process? This question leads us to use IRT to address the provocative question that constitutes the title of this paper: Do concept inventories actually measure anything?

Resource Letter AER-1: Astronomy education research

This Resource Letter guides the reader, whom we assume to be interested in the teaching and learning of astronomy, to the literature on astronomy education research. Journal articles and books are cited for the following topics: astronomy teaching resources; student understanding of astronomy topics, such as the nature of science in the context of astronomy, diurnal motion, seasons, lunar phases, Earth’s shape and gravity, the solar system, stars, galaxies, cosmology, and astrobiology; and the effectiveness of instructional interventions.

A Multi-Institutional Investigation of Students' Preinstructional Ideas about Cosmology.

In order to improve instruction in introductory astronomy, we are investigating students’ preinstructional ideas about a number of cosmology topics. This article describes one aspect of this large research study in which 1270 students responded to a subset of three questions each from a larger set of questions about the following areas: definition of a light-year and the structure, composition, and evolution of the Universe. Within structure, we investigated students’ ideas about definitions or descriptions of Solar System, Galaxy, Universe, and the relationships among them. Composition included the formation of chemical elements, dark matter, and dark energy, while evolution focused on the Big Bang Theory, age of the Universe, and how the Universe changes over time. Responses were iteratively coded for common themes. Major findings demonstrate that students commonly misidentify the light-year as a measurement of time, and that they provide incomplete definitions of common objects (Solar System, Galaxy) and the Universe itself, often conflating the terms. Generally speaking, students have little understanding of dark matter or dark energy, providing definitions that are superficial or do not answer the question. Consistent with previous research, we found students view the Big Bang as an explosion. Students’ ideas about the age of the Universe range from millions to trillions of years, but some students believe the Universe to be infinitely old. For both the age of the Universe and the Big Bang Theory, students are not familiar with the scientific evidence that exists, and in some cases do not believe such evidence can exist. Finally, students’ understanding of how the Universe changes over time is based largely on smaller changes of objects within it (e.g., stellar evolution) or the motions of objects (e.g., planetary orbits). These and other ideas provide fodder—both scientifically accurate and inaccurate—on which to build effective instruction. Particular attention should be paid to areas in which words that are used differently between our everyday vernacular and scientific language can create or reinforce alternative conceptions.

College Students' Preinstructional Ideas About Stars and Star Formation

Abstract This study Note 1 investigated the beliefs about stars that students hold when they enter an undergraduateintroductory astronomy course for nonscience majors. Students’ preinstructional ideas were investigated throughthe use of several student-supplied-response SSR surveys, which asked students to describe their ideasabout topics such as what is a star, how is starlight created, how are stars formed, are all stars the same, andmore. The results from more than 2,200 responses suggest that although students often have some initialknowledge about stars, their knowledge is often incomplete or incorrect in important ways that could negativelyimpact instructional objectives. 1. INTRODUCTION As we look into the sky during the daytime, what we see is dominated by the incredibly bright Sun. In theSun’s absence, we see points of light—virtually all of which are stars. The Sun, our closest star, plays atremendous role in the physical processes on Earth, which allow life to exist. Furthermore, the presenceand patterns of stars have played important roles in human beliefs, primarily through religions, calendars, andmythologies. A tremendous number of stars populate the universe, and the study of their nature and evolutionis a primary subdiscipline of astronomy. Given the importance of stars in our cultural and scientific history, itshould come as no surprise that stars are considered a central topic in astronomy.From a survey of U.S. college syllabi available on the Internet at that time, Slater

Investigating Student Ideas about Cosmology I: Distances and Structure.

Recently, powerful new observations and advances in computation and visualization have led to a revolution in our understanding of the structure of the Universe. As the field of cosmology advances, it is of interest to study how student ideas relate to scientific understanding. In this paper, we examine in-depth undergraduate students’ ideas on distances and structure in the Universe as students progress through a general education astronomy integrated lecture and laboratory course with a focus on active learning. The study was conducted over five semesters at an urban, minority-serving institution. The data collected include individual interviews (N1⁄4 15) and course artifacts (N 60), such as precourse homework essays, prelab surveys, and midterm and final exam questions in a variety of formats. We find that students are fairly successful at tasks involving relative distances, but struggle with absolute distances; have difficulty going beyond an elementary model of the Solar System as the Sun and planets; struggle to visualize galactic halos; but successfully increase their understanding of the hierarchical nature of structure in the Universe throughout the semester.

Investigating Student Ideas about Cosmology II: Composition of the Universe.

Continuing our work from a previous study (Coble et al. 2013), we examine undergraduates’ ideas on the composition of the Universe as they progress through a general education astronomy integrated lecture and laboratory course with a focus on active learning. The study was conducted over five semesters at an urban minority-serving institution. The data collected include individual interviews (N1⁄4 15) and course artifacts (N 60), such as prelab surveys, and midterm and final exam questions in a variety of formats. We find that students easily obtain a superficial knowledge of the origins of the chemical elements and the existence of dark matter and dark energy, which they are generally unaware of pre-instruction. However, they are hindered in their ability to reproduce the argument for the existence of dark matter at least in part because of weaknesses in their graph-reading abilities.

Experiencing conceptual change about teaching: A case study from astronomy

Understanding faculty motivations for and barriers to change is an important component of facilitating instructional reform efforts to improve student learning. This case study describes the process of adoption of learner-centered instructional strategies by an astronomy faculty member, Ken, as viewed through the lens of conceptual change. Specifically, we applied the Cognitive Reconstruction of Knowledge Model (CRKM) to understand why Ken was willing to change his instructional strategies, what barriers to and supports for change existed, and how he and his students were impacted by this change. Ken’s statements and actions represented characteristics consistent with the CRKM. Notably, dissatisfaction, considered the primary motivator in many conceptual change models, was not of high importance in this case. Upon implementing learner-centered strategies, Ken’s students performed better on a measure of knowledge about stellar properties, which served to reinforce his motivation to continue with learner-ce...

Concept Inventories for ASTRO 101

Throughout science education, instructors are searching for ways to evaluate the effectiveness of their instruction. Over the last decade, one method that has become popular is to use a concept inventory to investigate student learning gains in a particular topic over an instructional intervention such as a specific curriculum, unit, or course.