Shaw-IAU Workshops by the OAE

The discovery of Exoplanets is an exciting and popular research area in Astronomy. We have developed a new activity that makes current exoplanets transit data accessible for students in the introductory astronomy classroom. The majority of students participating in this work were non-STEM majors taking the course to satisfy their general education science requirement. The course is designed to actively engage students in developing explanatory models and improving their science and data literacy. The Lecture-Tutorial activity guides students reasoning using a sequence of cognitive tasks that allowed them to unpack and discern the meanings afforded by a series of carefully designed data representation. By working collaboratively through the activity students develop fluency with data characterizing the physical properties of exoplanet, with the goal of students being able to reason about whether our solar system serves as a good representation for the other planetary systems discovered using the transit method. In addition to developing a new suite of active learning classroom activities, we have also developed an assessment instrument to measure student learning gains on these topics. In this presentation, I will share the key data representation, tasks, and student learning outcomes where we have observed a significant gain in student learning.