Teaching the apparent motion of Sun and stars across four European countries

TL;DR

This study evaluates the effectiveness of educational interventions in teaching the apparent motion of the Sun and stars across four European countries, highlighting the challenges students face in understanding this complex concept.

Contribution

It introduces a comparative analysis of student understanding before and after targeted educational activities using a latent class approach across multiple countries.

Findings

Students show limited understanding of celestial motions.

Educational activities lead to some improvement in comprehension.

Understanding remains challenging despite interventions.

Abstract

In the context of the European Erasmus+ project Teaching ASTronomy at the Educational level (TASTE), we investigated the extent to which a learning module at school and a set of activities during a planetarium visit help students to gain insight in the Apparent Motion of the Sun and Stars. Therefore, we have set up a two treatment study with a pretest posttest design. In the four participating countries (Belgium, Germany, Greece and Italy), secondary school students studied the concept of the celestial globe at school using newly designed learning materials. By using a latent class analysis, we identified different classes of student answers on the AMoSS test. We show how students evolve from one class to another between pretest and posttest. Overall the results of the pretest and posttest show that a good understanding of the different aspects of the apparent motion of celestial bodies is difficult to achieve.