Status Of Astronomy Education In India: A Baseline Survey
TalkEvaluation and Astronomy Education Research
5th Shaw-IAU Workshop
Wednesday Nov. 29, 2023
UTC: 8:05 p.m. - 8:20 p.m.
Friday Dec. 1, 2023
UTC: 10:05 a.m. - 10:20 a.m.
Moupiya Maji (Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics; Office of Astronomy Education, India)
Coauthors: Surhud More (Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics), Aniket Sule (Homi Bhaba Centre for Science Education)
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As a first step towards improving astronomy education in schools, we at the OAE India Center are conducting a baseline survey to understand the status of astronomy education in India. In this survey, we investigate student perceptions about various facets of astronomy education, e.g. astronomy content in their syllabus, general interest, and connections of their cultural knowledge with astronomy. This survey was conducted nationwide in 10 languages with over 2000 students across many different environments. The data revealed that although students are interested in astronomy, even basic astronomical concepts remain poorly understood. This data will be very useful to develop an improved astronomy curriculum in the future and will guide us to develop effective teacher training programs.
About Moupiya Maji
Moupiya Maji is a postdoctoral researcher at IUCAA (Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics) working in astronomy education. She is currently a member of the Office of Astronomy Education (OAE), India. She previously completed her Ph.D. in computational astrophysics at The Pennsylvania State University and has worked at the University of Geneva. Her research interests include astronomy education, galaxies, and hydrodynamic simulations.
