Shaw-IAU Workshops by the OAE

For many students textbooks become the first contact point to kindle interest in a subject, like Astronomy explaining the day-to-day natural phenomena. Textbooks are instrumental in facilitating the scientific discourse in a classroom. Astronomy is introduced in middle school textbooks in many curricula across the world, most of the time it gets limited to mere collections of facts and observed phenomena, creating little appreciation for the nature of science. This study involved designing a framework for evaluating the completeness of the astronomy-related content in school textbooks. In this talk, I will present the case of two curricula from India to bring out the rationale behind the design and introduce the General Textbook Evaluation Tool developed for Astronomy content.

Biography:

Asmita Redij is an Post-doctoral Fellow at Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai. She has completed her Ph.D from University of Bern in Particle (Neutrino) Physics.

Her research interest includes, Astronomy/Physics education research, Culturally Responsive Pedagogy in the context of Science Teaching. She is also interested Science Communication and developing alternative means to reach the students from low resource regions.