Investigation carried out with pre-service elementary teachers on some basic astronomical topics

TL;DR

This study diagnoses pre-service elementary teachers' understanding of basic astronomy topics, revealing common misconceptions and difficulties, and aims to develop better didactic tools for their education.

Contribution

It introduces a new diagnostic instrument to identify misconceptions in astronomy among pre-service teachers and analyzes their understanding to improve teaching strategies.

Findings

Teachers struggle to explain Moon movements and phases.

Many have misconceptions about the origin of shooting stars and Venus.

A novel causality for seasons was identified, linking climate effects to astronomical causes.

Abstract

We perform a situational diagnosis in topics of astronomy of pre-service elementary teachers in order to try and develop didactic tools that better collaborate with their formal education. In this work we present the instrument we designed to put in evidence some of the most frequently used models on a few basic astronomical notions endowed by them. We work with an open written questionnaire comprising a limited but representative group of basic astronomical notions. We discuss the results of two first pilot tests, provided to 30 individuals, and we comment on the necessary changes applied to the instrument in order to design the final questionnaire, which was then provided to another group of 51 pre-service elementary teachers. A detailed qualitative analysis of the answers revealed many well-known alternative conceptions, and others that seem new. We find that prospective teachers have a hard time in trying to explain the movements of the Moon and its phases. They also meet difficulties to recognize and explain a couple of astronomical elements that make part of our ordinary language, like the origin of a shooting star and the real identity of the "lucero" (i.e., planet Venus). Amongst the answers offered to explain the causes of the seasons, we found a singular causality, which we think has not been sufficiently emphasized in the literature so far. Many of the inquired people did not advance an explicative model -a cause: say, the tilt of the Earth's axis- to justify a particular phenomenon -the effect: the seasons on the Earth-, but rather made use of another phenomenon/effect, in the present case related to the climate, in order to explain the seasons. However, as we know, this phenomenon/effect (the climate) has a strong astronomical component. We present here the full results of the first two tests and of the final instrument employed, and we draw some conclusions.