Astronomy Education Journal

In this edition - Volume 3

2023-12-21T22:17:47+11:00

The third edition of AEJ

Remembering a passionate Astronomy Education Researcher

2023-12-21T22:00:42+11:00

Messages from around the world in memory of Prof. Paulo Sergio Bretones

An Initial Investigation of Students’ Understanding of Space Exploration

2023-09-13T08:32:55+10:00

The topic of space exploration receives little attention in most introductory astronomy courses. However, students come to such courses with both an interest and ideas informed by popular media–ideas that may or may not be consistent with scientific and engineering outlooks. This study explored what students recall about space exploration ideas after engaging with two short, in-class activities on the possibility of travel to Mars and the use of solar sails for exploration. We asked four open-ended questions for extra credit and coded students’ responses ($N$ = 106 to 150) for themes. Coding demonstrated that students had reasonable, if limited, understanding of factors influencing both crewed and uncrewed mission types as well as risks to crews after completing these activities.

Could strengthening the skills of proportional calculus improve astronomy learning in children?

2023-09-12T22:21:51+10:00

Students have numerous difficulties operating with astronomical sizes and distances. This work presents the results of a didactic intervention framed in the Conceptual Integration Theory (CIT) and the cognitive strategy of “mental anchors” in the context of astronomy teaching in elementary school. It consisted of the implementation of several activities to promote the understanding, identification and production of scale representations based on an in-depth work on the proportional reasoning process, perspective and the choice of reference systems under the hypothesis that strengthening these skills could improve the learning of astronomy. To evaluate its effectiveness, results were compared within three groups of 10 and 11 years-old students (N=54) subjected to the intervention and one control group (N=20). Based on the results, the intervention was successful: the students improved greatly their ability to recognize and produce scale representations regarding astronomical scales and strengthened the concept of perspective and its relation to the perception of the size of objects in terms of size and distance.

PD Days Under the Moon: Teaching Lunar Phases to In-Service Teachers by Doing Astronomy Like Astronomers Do and its Impact on Their Students’ Learning

2023-07-05T22:03:44+10:00

Several school curricula urge K-12 teachers to engage their students in scientific inquiry activities that not only promote students’ learning in science, but also foster students’ understanding of science methodology. Unfortunately, recent large-scale studies have shown that inquiry-based science teaching in school is the exception, rather than the norm. This is especially true for astronomy, which teachers often consider too abstract and remote for inquiry-based teaching. To promote inquiry-based teaching in astronomy, we present an epistemological and historical analysis of the way astronomers build new knowledge and propose to teach astronomy through a scientific inquiry process consisting of “Doing astronomy like astronomers do”. This inquiry-based approach, which also includes observation, modelling, and communication with peers, emulates the different steps astronomers and scientists go through to do empirical science (question, hypothesis, observation, analysis/synthesis, modelling, prediction/application, and communication), transposed into a teaching and learning lesson plan about the phases of the Moon. The crucial steps of observation, analysis/synthesis, and modelling, where astronomers create models as proxies of astronomical objects that cannot be manipulated, is highlighted. This inquiry-based astronomy training, which also promotes conceptual change about lunar phases, was tested with 18 in-service elementary and high school teachers engaged in a professional development (PD) training program. Three participant teachers also taught lunar phases to their own elementary and high school students (N = 104) using the same approach. We present the results of a quasi-experimental study of the impacts of this PD training about lunar phases on the learning gains and self-efficacy of the participating in-service teachers, as well as on their students’ learning.

Effects of Popular Science Writing Instruction on General Education Student Attitudes Towards Science: A Case Study in Astronomy

2023-05-04T17:11:44+10:00

For many students, introductory college science courses are often the only opportunity in their formal higher education to be exposed to science, shaping their view of the subject, their scientific literacy, and their attitudes towards their own ability in STEM. While science writing instruction has been demonstrated to impact attitudes and outlooks of STEM majors in their coursework, this instructional strategy has yet to be explored for non-majors. In this work, we investigate student attitudes towards STEM before and after taking a writing-intensive introductory astronomy course. We find that students cite writing about science as beneficial to their learning, deepening their understanding of science topics and their perspective on science as a field and finding writing to be a ``bridge'' between STEM content and their focus on humanities in their majors. Students also report increased perceptions of their own ability and confidence in engaging with STEM across multiple metrics, leaving the course more prepared to be informed, engaged, and science literate citizens.

Promoting perspective-taking in astronomy by casting images from a phone or tablet up unto a screen

2023-08-18T17:05:41+10:00

Astronomy is a spatial science that requires connecting and comparing different points of view on astronomical systems to understand their complex mechanisms. Textbooks’ illustrations often fail to provide such connections, whereas 3D models of astronomical systems that students can “manipulate” are more conducive to learning. But providing learners with different perspectives simultaneously on an astronomical model can be difficult. One way to achieve this goal is by using a smartphone’s or tablet’s camera to capture the geocentric point of view, and sending the image in real-time via a casting device on a TV monitor or projecting a video image on a screen for all students to see. This way, learners can easily switch from their own “space-based” (i.e., allocentric) perspective on the model to what an observer on Earth (i.e., the view captured by the camera) would see at the same time. In this Best practice paper, presented principally as a resource for educators, we review the relevant literature on teaching astronomy with concrete models and promote classroom activities that use cameras, casting devices and projectors to teach the diurnal cycle, the phases of the Moon and eclipses, the seasons, and planetary motion.

MESA-Web: A cloud resource for stellar evolution in astronomy curriculum

2022-08-23T10:10:37+10:00

We present MESA-Web,a cloud resource with an online interface to the Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA) software instrument. MESA-Web allows learners to evolve stellar models without the need to download and install MESA. Since being released in 2015, MESA-Web has delivered over 17,000 calculations to over 2,200 unique learners and currently performs about 11 jobs per day. MESA-Web can be used as an educational tool for stars in the classroom or for scientific investigations.
We report on new capabilities of MESA-Web introduced since its 2015 release including learner-supplied nuclear reaction rates, custom stopping conditions, and an expanded selection of input parameters. To foster collaboration we have created a Zenodo MESA-Web community hub, where instructors can openly share examples of using MESA-Web in the classroom. We discuss two examples in the current community hub. The first example is a lesson module on Red Giant Branch stars that includes a suite of exercises designed to fit a range of learners and a Jupyter workbook for additional analysis. The second example is lesson materials for an upper-level Astronomy majors course in Stars and Radiation that includes an assignment verifying some of the expected trends that are presented in a popular stellar physics textbook.

Knowing the Universe: Teaching the History and Philosophy of Astronomy

2023-03-08T22:10:50+11:00

Astronomy is the oldest science, with connections to development of the most important concepts in physics. A course is described that covers its evolution from prehistory to modern cosmology, giving due weight to the philosophical implications of the subject. The pedagogy is designed to let students develop their writing and reasoning skills. The newly developed course has been delivered to three distinct audiences: non-science majors at a major public university, adult community members taking the course for enrichment, and a worldwide audience of lifelong adult learners who enroll in a massive open online course (MOOC). Class content is informed by the scholarly literature on philosophy and the history of physics and astronomy. Subject matter is divided into thirteen chronological topics: Ancient Skies, Greek Science, Revolutions, Telescopes, Gravity, Evolution, Mapping, Relativity, Quantum Theory, Stars and Atoms, Galaxies, the Big Bang, and Life in the Universe. The topics are presented at a rate of one per week during the standard university semester, and they are parsed into five two-hour sessions for the local community audience and seven weeks of self-paced video lectures for the online MOOC audience.

ExMASS: Implementation and evaluation of an authentic, inquiry-based research experience for secondary students

2023-01-26T17:56:26+11:00

The Exploration of the Moon and Asteroids by Secondary Students (ExMASS) program provides pre-college students the opportunity to conduct authentic, inquiry-based research with assistance from their teacher and a professional scientist. This paper presents an overview of the ExMASS program and results of ongoing program evaluation. The goals of the ExMASS program are to 1) provide an opportunity for secondary students to engage in multiple practices of science, 2) foster positive student attitudes toward science, and 3) enhance student lunar and asteroid science content knowledge. Evaluation data affirms the program is meeting these stated goals. In particular, assessment of student attitudes toward science show statistically significant increases in positive attitudes post program. The validity of the survey has been shown previously through factor analysis (Shaner et al., 2018). This paper includes a discussion of the continued assessment of student attitudes toward science (n = 125 students), showing statistically significant changes in both personal connections to science and the importance of science in society.

Video as a Vehicle for Astronomy Education and Outreach

2023-02-07T08:32:03+11:00

Video is an excellent vehicle for astronomy education and outreach. Usage patterns and user demographics are presented for short videos covering a variety of astronomy topics, delivered to public audiences from three websites, three YouTube channels, and three massive open online classes, or MOOCs. The data spans over a decade in some cases. The modality of the content ranges from short lecture presentations of sub-topics in astronomy to longer scripted pieces created by students to Q&A sessions held by the MOOC instructor with live audiences of 100-200. In the aggregate, the videos have attracted 1.2 million views, and those viewers have watched 77,300 hours of astronomy content. Most of the viewers are not based in the United States. Viewership rose dramatically at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic and has not yet returned to pre-pandemic levels. The videos watched by lifelong learners taking a MOOC show a decline in usage as they progress through the online course. But on these YouTube channels, when viewers can choose among the topics, the most popular are cosmology and exoplanets. Suggestions are made for the effective ways to create and disseminate astronomy videos.

Adapting Betelgeuse’s Dimming Event to A High School Level Astronomy Exercise

2022-10-17T21:14:08+11:00

This article outlines the process of designing a problem for Astronomy Olympiad at high-school level, based on a recent curious astrophysical event. Betelgeuse, one of the brightest star in the night sky and a supernova candidate, started dimming in October 2019 and reached a record minimum magnitude in February 2020. This extraordinary event piqued curiosity in professional astronomers, amateur astronomers as well as mass media. The problem presented here, tries to build a quantitative model of the event for the students, based on just high school physics. This problem included three models viz., a stellar pulsation model, an exoplanet transit model and a mass loss event model. The students were asked to calculate few physical quantities or parameters to deduce the most suitable model. The entire process of problem design including constraints involved, alternative approaches explored and discarded and the final draft is laid out. It is hoped that this discussion will serve as a guiding light to fellow problem designers and question setters.