Investigation carried out with pre-service elementary teachers on some basic astronomical topics
Alejandro Gangui, Maria Iglesias, Cynthia Quinteros

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…
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Taxonomy
TopicsEducation and Islamic Studies
