"Figuring Out What Your Students Really Think:
An Example from Astronomy Education Research"

Rebecca Lindell, Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville
Friday, April 23, 2004 at 4:30 pm

Over the last twenty years the physics and astronomy education research communities have taught us a great deal about how students learn physics and astronomy. One thing is clear; our students enter the physics and astronomy classes with their own ideas about how the world works. Unfortunately these ideas are often not aligned with what we are trying to teach, and our students do not end up learning the material, but rather construct their own understanding as a hodgepodge of what we are trying to teach and what they already know. The physics and astronomy education research communities have told us, that the way to fix this problem is to first be aware of our prior understandings and then to design specialized instruction that will allow our students to specifically confront the fallacies in their prior understanding. In this talk, I will prevent an example from astronomy education research, which demonstrates how a diagnostic test given at the beginning of the semester can be utilized to uncover the different conceptions that students have concerning lunar phases, as well as the instructional adjustments we have made in our instruction based on these results.