- Physical Review Journals
All JournalsPhysics Magazine

Physical Review Physics Education Research

Reuse & Permissions

It is not necessary to obtain permission to reuse this article or its components as it is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI are maintained. Please note that some figures may have been included with permission from other third parties. It is your responsibility to obtain the proper permission from the rights holder directly for these figures.

Export citation

Export citation

Choose format for download:

Download Citation
  • Featured in Physics
  • Open Access

Cross-sectional study of students’ knowledge of sizes and distances of astronomical objects

Vinesh M. Rajpaul1,2, Christine Lindstrøm3,4,*, Megan C. Engel2, Morten Brendehaug3, and Saalih Allie5

  • 1University of Cambridge, Astrophysics Group, Cavendish Laboratory, J. J. Thomson Avenue, Cambridge CB3 0HE, United Kingdom
  • 2Department of Physics, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3RH, United Kingdom
  • 3Faculty of Education and International Studies, Oslo Metropolitan University, PB 4 St. Olavs plass, N-0130 Oslo, Norway
  • 4Centre for Computing in Science Education, Department of Physics, University of Oslo, Sem Sælands vei 24, N-0316 Oslo, Norway
  • 5Department of Physics and Academic Development Programme, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, South Africa, 7701

  • *christine.lindstrom@hioa.no
PDF

Phys. Rev. Phys. Educ. Res. 14, 020108 – Published 14 September, 2018

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.14.020108

Abstract

This paper reports on the results from administering a modified version of the Introductory Astronomy Questionnaire (IAQ) to middle school students and preservice science teachers in Norway. Ranking tasks formed a key part of the instrument, and we detail a new method for analyzing ranking task data. One of our main findings was that even after instruction, a significant proportion of students held erroneous views and conceptions regarding sizes, distances, and the nature of basic astronomical entities, such as stars and planets. We argue that the commonalities between some of the issues we identified and those presented in extant studies—from a variety of countries, with samples ranging from junior high school students and undergraduates to primary school teachers—may point to deeper cognitive issues inherent in, and possibly unique to, engaging with astronomy.

View figure in article

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Focus

Astronomy Students Not Learning the Basics

Published 14 September, 2018

Nearly half of middle school students in a Norwegian study thought that planets are bigger than stars, even after astronomy instruction.

See more in Physics

Article Text

References (50)

  1. R. R. Hake, Interactive-engagement versus traditional methods: A six-thousand-student survey of mechanics test data for introductory physics courses, Am. J. Phys. 66, 64 (1998).
  2. L. C. McDermott and E. F. Redish, Resource letter: Per-1: Physics education research, Am. J. Phys. 67, 755 (1999).
  3. A. A. diSessa and P. Cobb, Ontological innovation and the role of theory in design experiments, J. Learn. Sci. 13, 77 (2004).
  4. U. Eriksson, C. Linder, J. Airey, and A. Redfors, Who needs 3D when the universe is flat?, Sci. Educ. 98, 412 (2014).
  5. A. Lelliott and M. Rollnick, Big Ideas: A review of astronomy education research 1974-2008, Int. J. Sci. Educ. 32, 1771 (2010).
  6. J. M. Bailey and T. F. Slater, A review of astronomy education research, Astron. Educ. Rev. 2, 20 (2004).
  7. C. S. Wallace, E. E. Prather, and D. K. Duncan, A study of general education astronomy students’ understandings of cosmology. Part IV. Common difficulties students experience with cosmology, Astron. Educ. Rev. 11, 010104 (2012).
  8. J. M. Bailey and D. Lombardi, Blazing the trail for astronomy education research, J. Astron. Earth Sci. Educ. 2, 77 (2015).
  9. C. Bakas and T. A. Mikropoulos, Design of virtual environments for the comprehension of planetary phenomena based on students’ ideas, Int. J. Sci. Educ. 25, 949 (2003).
  10. M. Cin, Alternative views of the solar system among Turkish students, Int. Rev. Educ. 53, 39 (2007).
  11. M. Summers and J. Mant, A misconceived view of subject-matter knowledge in primary science education: a response to golby et al. ‘some researchers’ understanding of primary teaching, Res. Papers Educ. 10, 303 (1995).
  12. P. M. Sadler, The initial knowledge state of high school astronomy students, Ph.D. thesis, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 1992.
  13. B. W. Miller and W. F. Brewer, Misconceptions of astronomical distances, Int. J. Sci. Educ. 32, 1549 (2010).
  14. P. M. Sadler, Psychometric models of student conceptions in science: Reconciling qualitative studies and distractor-driven assessment instruments, J. Res. Sci. Teach. 35, 265 (1998).
  15. T. M. Fanetti, The relationships of scale concepts on college age students’ misconceptions about the cause of lunar phases, Master’s thesis, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, 2001.
  16. Central Intelligence Agency, CIA World Factbook—Norway, (2016), online: accessed 22 November 2016.
  17. United Nations Development Programme, 2015 Human Development Report, (2015), online: accessed 22 November 2016.
  18. Legatum, The Legatum Prosperity Index, (2016), online: accessed 22 November 2016.
  19. Wikipedia, Norway—Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, (2016), online: accessed 22 November 2016.
  20. Store norske leksikon: Skole og utdanning i norge, (2015), online: accessed 30 June 2015.
  21. P. R. Ekeland, O.-I. Johansen, O. Rygh, and S. B. Strand, Tellus 8: Naturfag for ungdomstrinnet (Aschehoug, Oslo, 2006).
  22. M. Hannisdal, J. Haugan, J. Nyberg, and M. Frøyland, Eureka! 8, Naturfag for ungdomstrinnet, grunnbok (Gyldendal, Oslo, 2006).
  23. H. S. Finstad, J. Kolderup, and E. C. Jørgensen, , Trigger 8: Naturfag for ungdomstrinnet (Cappelen Damm, Oslo, 2006).
  24. T. L. O’Kuma, D. P. Maloney, and C. J. Hieggelke, Ranking Task Exercises in Physics (Prentice Hall Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2000), Vol. 26.
  25. D. P. Maloney, Charged poles?, Phys. Educ. 20, 310 (1985).
  26. S. J. Slater, P. S. Sharon, and D. J. Stork, Analysis of individual test of astronomy standards (toast) item responses, J. Astron. Earth Sci. Educ. 2, 89 (2015).
  27. T. H. Cormen, C. E. Leiserson, R. L. Rivest, and C. Stein, Introduction to Algorithms (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2009).

  28. In the future, it might also be helpful to include a simple, nonastronomical ranking task (e.g., rank a house, an apple, a mountain, etc., from smallest to largest) to identify specific students who have difficulty interpreting the ranking tasks as indented.

  29. V. Rajpaul, S. Allie, and S.-L. Blyth, Introductory astronomy course at the University of Cape Town: Probing student perspectives, Phys. Rev. ST Phys. Educ. Res. 10, 020126 (2014).
  30. C. Lindstrøm, V. Rajpaul, M. Brendehaug, and M. C. Engel, Perspectives on astronomy: probing Norwegian pre-service teachers and middle school students, in Proceedings of the Physics Education Conference, College Park, MD, July 29–30, 2015, edited by A. D. Churukian, D. L. Jones, and L. Ding (AIP, New York, 2016).
  31. D. W. Hudgins, E. E. Prather, D. J. Grayson, and D. P. Smits, Effectiveness of collaborative ranking tasks on student understanding of key astronomy concepts, Astron. Educ. Rev. 5, 1 (2006).
  32. E. Jones, T. Oliphant, and P. Peterson, SciPy: Open source scientific tools for Python (2001).

  33. Admittedly stellar remnants such as white dwarf and neutron stars are smaller than most planets, but we have no reason to believe students adopted this extremely narrow interpretation of the term “star.”

  34. When comparing Q7 and Q5b scores for the preservice teachers, the χ2 test did not allow us to reject the null hypothesis of complete statistical independence: this is not the same as proving there was definitely no form of association between the scores. Thus, the results from the χ2 tests and linear-correlation analysis are not incompatible.

  35. V. R. welcomes correspondence from anyone who would like to discuss such software, perhaps with a view to applying it in their own research.

  36. R. Trumper, A cross-age study of junior high school students’ conceptions of basic astronomy concepts, Int. J. Sci. Educ. 23, 1111 (2001).
  37. R. Trumper, A cross-college age study of science and nonscience students’ conceptions of basic astronomy concepts in preservice training for high-school teachers, J. Sci. Educ. Technol. 10, 189 (2001).
  38. Times Higher Education, World University Rankings, (2018), online: accessed 1 March 2018.

  39. Whereas we believe basic knowledge to be sufficient for understanding most astronomical phenomena taught in schools and even Astro-101, it is unlikely to be sufficient at higher levels of education. One could propose the concept of advanced knowledge of objects, which would include and extends basic knowledge; it might comprise technical knowledge (which extends qualitative knowledge) and scale knowledge (which refers to the relative rank and magnitude of a pair of objects). We defer consideration of such possibilities to future work.

  40. G. M. Novak, E. T. Patterson, A. D. Gavrin, W. Christian, and K. Forinash, Just in time teaching, Am. J. Phys. 67, 937 (1999).
  41. G. M. Novak, Just-in-time teaching, New Directions Teaching Learning 2011, 63 (2011).
  42. E. Mazur, Peer instruction: Getting students to think in class, AIP Conf. Proc. 399, 981 (1997).
  43. E. Mazur and M. D. Somers, Peer instruction: A user’s manual, Am. J. Phys. 67, 359 (1999).

  44. Using formal propositional logic, note that (A→B)⇔(¬B→¬A). On the other hand, (A→B)⇔(B→A).

  45. K. C. Yu, K. Sahami, and J. Dove, Learning about the scale of the solar system using digital planetarium visualizations, Am. J. Phys. 85, 550 (2017).
  46. I. Resnick, N. S. Newcombe, and T. F. Shipley, Dealing with big numbers: Representation and understanding of magnitudes outside of human experience, Cogn. Sci. 41, 1020 (2017).
  47. C. Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (Random House, New York, 1994).
  48. B. Russell, The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell, edited by R. E. Egner and L. E. Denonn (Routledge, London, 2009).
  49. M. R. Matthews, Science, worldviews and education: An introduction, Sci. Educ. 18, 641 (2009).
  50. C. S. Wallace, E. E. Prather, and B. M. Mendelsohn, Astro 101 students’ perceptions of science: Results from the thinking about science survey instrument, Astron. Educ. Rev. 12, 010101 (2013).

Outline

Information

Phys. Rev. Phys. Educ. Res. 14, 020108– Published 14 September, 2018
  • Received 25 October 2017
Crossmark - Check for updates button
Creative Commons Logo

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International 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

Sign In to Your Journals Account

Filter

Filter

Article Lookup

Enter a citation