A cross-age study on secondary school students' views of stars

TL;DR

This study investigates how secondary students' understanding of stars develops across different educational stages, revealing a gradual alignment with scientific views and persistent misconceptions, using a newly validated assessment instrument.

Contribution

The paper introduces a validated instrument for assessing students' views of stars and applies it in a cross-age study to track conceptual development.

Findings

Students' views increasingly align with scientific understanding as they progress through secondary school.

Persistent misconceptions about stars remain prevalent across all educational levels.

The new assessment instrument is reliable and effective for measuring students' astronomy concepts.

Abstract

Research in astronomy education has uncovered that many learners possess limited and fragmented understanding of stars. The corresponding misconceptions manifest in various areas such as star formation, size, the relationship between stars and planets, and their position in space and have been shown to persist across different age groups and educational settings, highlighting the need for further investigation. This paper presents the findings of an empirical study that examines secondary students' views of stars and their evolution throughout their secondary school careers. Therefore, we designed and evaluated an instrument for assessing students' views of stars in five domains. The instrument creation process involved several steps, including literature-based item development, an expert survey with faculty members, and a quantitative pilot study with a sample of 390 secondary school and college students. This process led to a final version of the instrument that exhibits good psychometric properties. We used this new instrument in a cross-age study to investigate the alignment of secondary students' ideas about stars with scientific views across different stages of secondary education. The sample of this main study comprised a total of 366 learners, from lower, middle and upper secondary school. Our study findings reveal a progressive development of students' perspectives on star-related topics throughout their school career: We observed a statistically significant increase in the proportion of responses aligning with scientific views across all aspects of stars examined in this study, as students progressed from lower secondary to upper secondary levels. We further report on widely held views of stars among our study participants that oppose the scientific views, and discuss the implications of our findings for both educational research and practice.