We introduce the Newtonian Gravity Concept Inventory (NGCI), a 26-item multiple-choice instrument to assess introductory general education college astronomy (“Astro 101”) student understanding of Newtonian gravity. This paper describes the development of the NGCI through four phases: Planning, Construction, Quantitative Analysis, and Validation. We discuss the evolution of the instrument through three versions, including the refinement of a set of four concept domains and nine examples of items to illustrate how expert review, student interviews, and Classical Test Theory statistics informed our approach. We conclude that the NGCI is a reliable and valid instrument.
Professors who teach introductory astronomy to students not majoring in science desire them to comprehend the concepts and theories that form the basis of the science. They are usually less concerned about the myriad of detailed facts and information that accompanies the science. As such, professors prefer to test the students for such comprehension. The multiple choice format for examinations is often excluded since it appears to focus only upon factual information. This paper proposes to show that the multiple choice format can be used to create non-trivial examinations that test for higher-order thinking. The paper shows, with numerous examples, how to design such questions within the didactic framework of Bloom’s taxonomy. Following a discussion of how the taxonomy relates to goals and objectives in teaching astronomy, the paper proceeds to focus upon each of the taxonomic categories with examples of sophisticated questions about specific astronomical concepts. The goal is to explicate the design theory so that instructors can create unlimited numbers of questions for their own courses. As such, it is not a research paper but, rather, one to provide working instructors with helpful hints for improving their testing. Included at the end of the paper is an algorithm for the construction of a grade curve, and some discussion of using the statistical analysis of the examination questions to evaluate the performance of individual students and to improve the test questions themselves.
We present a set of exercises designed to be used in a survey astronomy course, an introductory astronomy laboratory course, or in secondary education. The exercises use the great works of Vincent van Gogh but could be easily extended to other works of art. We also include a brief description of our current practices, lectures, and group questions as examples of material that should be discussed prior to use of these “AstroArt” exercises.
I discuss a pedagogical strategy in which we ask students to write about science. Such writing is to be done regularly and often, in class and out of class, in the format of brief “letters to a friend” and longer essays. The goal of this technique is not to teach students how to write; it is to use their writing to help them learn the science. Such exercises can be helpful even if the instructor never reads the students’ compositions.
The Zooniverse projects turn everyday people into “citizen scientists” who work online with real data to assist scientists in conducting research on a variety of topics related to galaxies, exoplanets, lunar craters, and solar flares, among others. This paper describes our initial study to assess the conceptual knowledge and reasoning abilities of citizen scientists participating in two Zooniverse projects: Galaxy Zoo and Moon Zoo. In order to measure their knowledge and abilities, we developed two new assessment instruments, the Zooniverse Astronomical Concept Survey (ZACS) and the Lunar Cratering Concept Inventory (LCCI). We found that citizen scientists with the highest level of participation in the Galaxy Zoo and Moon Zoo projects also have the highest average correct scores on the items of the ZACS and LCCI. However, the limited nature of the data provided by Zooniverse participants prevents us from being able to evaluate the statistical significance of this finding, and we make no claim about whether there is a causal relationship between one’s participation in Galaxy Zoo or Moon Zoo and one’s level of conceptual understanding or reasoning ability on the astrophysical topics assessed by the ZACS or the LCCI. Overall, both the ZACS and the LCCI provide Zooniverse’s citizen scientists with items that offer a wide range of difficulties. Using the data from the small subset of participants who responded to all items of the ZACS, we found evidence suggesting the ZACS is a reliable instrument (a 1⁄4 0.78), although twenty-one of its forty items appear to have point biserials less than 0.3. The work reported here provides significant insight into the strengths and limitations of various methods for administering assessments to citizen scientists. Researchers who wish to study the knowledge and abilities of citizen scientists in the future should be sure to design their research methods to avoid the pitfalls identified by our initial findings.
AbstractThe growth of the Internet has facilitated the easy availability of resources for teaching astronomy and doing astronomy outreach. This overview concentrates on resources that are free or open access. Basic teaching materials like textbooks and lab activities can be found, along with higher level items such as concept inventories and interactive instructional tools. There is also a small but growing research literature on astronomy instruction to be found online. Astronomers engaged in outreach can have access to large image collections, tools for doing citizen science, and planetarium apps. These resources are of enormous value to both novice and seasoned instructors, and anyone conveying the excitement of astronomy to a public audience.
Citizen science, in which volunteers work with professional scientists to conduct research, is expanding due to large online datasets. To plan projects, it is important to understand volunteers' motivations for participating. This paper analyzes results from an online survey of nearly 11,000 volunteers in Galaxy Zoo, an astronomy citizen science project. Results show that volunteers' primary motivation is a desire to contribute to scientific research. We encourage other citizen science projects to study the motivations of their volunteers, to see whether and how these results may be generalized to inform the field of citizen science.
The increasing use of interactive learning strategies in Astro 101 classrooms has led some instructors to consider the usefulness of a textbook in such classes. These strategies provide students a learning modality very different from the traditional lecture supplemented by reading a textbook and homework, and raises the question of whether the learning that takes place during such interactive activities is enough by itself to teach students what we wish them to know about astronomy. To address this question, assessment data is presented from an interactive class, which was first taught with a required textbook, and then with the textbook being optional. Comparison of test scores before and after this change shows no statistical difference in student achievement whether a textbook is required or not. In addition, comparison of test scores of students who purchased the textbook to those who did not, after the textbook became optional, also show no statistical difference between the two groups. The Light and Spectroscopy Concept Inventory (LSCI), a research-validated assessment tool, was given pre- and post-instruction to three classes that had a required textbook, and one for which the textbook was optional, and the results demonstrate that the student learning gains on this central topic were statistically indistinguishable between the two groups. Finally, the Star Properties Concept Inventory (SPCI), another research-validated assessment tool, was administered to a class for which the textbook was optional, and the class performance was higher than that of a group of classes in a national study.
This paper describes a series of activities in which students investigate and use the Ptolemaic, Copernican, and Tychonic models of planetary motion. The activities guide students through using open source software to discover important observational facts, learn the necessary vocabulary, understand the fundamental properties of different theoretical models, and relate the theoretical models to observational data. After completing these activities students can make observations of a fictitious solar system and use those observations to construct models for that system.
This October would have marked the 12th anniversary of the first paper published in a new on-line journal called Astronomy Education Review (AER). Instead of celebrating that anniversary, however, it appears that we must face the fact that the journal will cease publication in its present form. After taking over the journal from its founding editors (Sidney Wolff and Andrew Fraknoi) and its founding publisher (the National Optical Astronomy Observatories) and subsidizing and publishing the journal for five years, the Council of the American Astronomical Society (with the advice of its Publications Board) decided that AER had too few papers, too few readers, and covered astronomy education too narrowly to be supported by the Society, with only a very small contribution from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and a few small donations as outside income.
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.
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.
This research project aimed to identify and analyze Mexican primary school students’ ideas about the components of the solar system. In particular, this study focused on conceptions of the solar system and representations of the dynamics of the solar system based on the functional and structural models that students make in school. Using a Euclidean distance-based cluster analysis, six different models of the solar system were identified. The results of this study suggest that these models do not specifically correlate to one school grade. The identified models vary in complexity, not only by the number of components but also by the dynamic interactions and distributions of the elements that comprise the models. This diversity of models shows that students do not simply reproduce the diagrams in their textbooks or the diagrams that they have access to in their environment. Though the oldest children’s models approach textbook diagrams in the more complex models, up and down movements are still present in children’s explanations of their models.
