A Proposed Astronomy Learning Progression For Remote Telescope Observation

Providing meaningful telescope observing experiences for students who are deeply urban or distantly rural place-bound—or even daylight time-bound—has consistently presented a formidable challenge for astronomy educators.  For nearly 2 decades, the Internet has promised unfettered access for large numbers of students to conduct remote telescope observing, but it has only been in recent years that the technology has become readily available.  Now that this once fanciful possibility is becoming a reality, astronomy education researchers need a guiding theory on which to develop learning experiences.  As one departure point, we propose a potential learning progression anchored on one end with recognizing that stars visible at night have describable locations and predictable motions, and anchored at the other with distant robotic telescopes can be programmed to record specific astronomical data for later analysis

iSTAR first light: Characterizing astronomy education research dissertations in the iSTAR database

There is widespread interest among discipline-based science education researchers to situate their research in the existing scholarly literature base. Unfortunately, traditional approaches to conducting a thorough literature review are unduly hindered in astronomy education research as the venues in which scholarship is reported are fragmented and widely dispersed across journals of varying disciplines. The international STudies of Astronomy education Research (iSTAR) online repository is the result of a concerted international community effort to collect and categorize existing research from peer-reviewed journal articles, dissertations/theses, and grey literature. In a “first light” survey of over 300 U.S. dissertations, we find: (i) work in AER dates back to 1923; (ii) the number of extant dissertations is far greater than anticipated; (iii) research methods definitions have evolved; and (iv) most work has studied participants’ broad knowledge rather than specific learning targets. The surprisingly wide breadth of rarely cited research motivates us to collect more AER from across international and cross-disciplinary sources

Research on teaching astronomy in the planetarium

From a noted specialist in astronomy education and outreach, this Brief provides an overview of the most influential discipline-based science education research literature now guiding contemporary astronomy teaching. In recent years, systematic studies of effective and efficient teaching strategies have provided a solid foundation for enhancing college-level students’ learning in astronomy. Teaching astronomy and planetary science at the college-level was once best characterized as professor-centered, information-download lectures. Today, astronomy faculty are striving to drastically improve the learning environment by using innovative teaching approaches.  Uniquely, the authors have organized this book around strands of commonly employed astronomy teaching strategies to help readers, professors, and scholars quickly access the most relevant work while, simultaneously, avoiding the highly specialized, technical vocabulary of constructivist educational pedagogies unfamiliar to most astronomy professors. For readers who are currently teaching astronomy at the college level—or those who plan on teaching at the college level in the future—this Brief provides an indispensable guide

A Proposed Astronomy Learning Progression For Remote Telescope Observation

Providing meaningful telescope observing experiences for students who are deeply urban or distantly rural place-bound—or even daylight time-bound—has consistently presented a formidable challenge for astronomy educators. For nearly 2 decades, the Internet has promised unfettered access for large numbers of students to conduct remote telescope observing, but it has only been in recent years that the technology has become readily available. Now that this once fanciful possibility is becoming a reality, astronomy education researchers need a guiding theory on which to develop learning experiences. As one departure point, we proposea potential learning progression anchored on one end with recognizing that stars visible at night have describable locations and predictable motions, and anchored at the other with distant robotic telescopes can be programmed to record specific astronomical data for later analysis