Teaching the apparent motion of Sun and stars across four European countries

Abstract

In the context of the European Erasmus+ project Teaching ASTronomy at the Educational level (TASTE), we investigated the extent to which a learning module at school and a set of activities during a planetarium visit help students to gain insight in the Apparent Motion of the Sun and Stars. Therefore, we have set up a two treatment study with a pretest posttest design. In the four participating countries (Belgium, Germany, Greece and Italy), secondary school students studied the concept of the celestial globe at school using newly designed learning materials. The first group with the Belgian students only took this learning module at school. A second group with the German, Greek and Italian students applied the concepts learned at school during two hands-on workshops and a planetarium presentation in the dome. Before the start of the learning activities at school, we administered the Apparent Motion of Sun and Stars (AMoSS) test as pretest with twelve multiple choice questions to the 13-17 years old students of eight European secondary schools (N=262). Immediately after the learning activities in school or planetarium, the students took the AmoSS test again (posttest). On average, the results of both tests show similar learning gains for the two groups, but we see a clear distinction between the Sun-related and the star-related questions. In the first group, the learning gains on questions about the stars are higher than on questions about the Sun, while in the second group it is just the other way around. We also see differences between the two groups, when looking at the learning gains per question. By using a latent class analysis, we identified different classes of student answers. We show how students evolve from one class to another between pretest and posttest. Overall the results of the pretest and posttest show that a good understanding of the different aspects of the apparent motion of celestial bodies is difficult to achieve.