Shaw-IAU Workshops by the OAE

Literature shows that students have a hard time making estimations of astronomical scales, and very often underestimate the vastness of space. In this research, we constructed and deployed an interactive online survey to probe students’ ideas of sizes and distances in the Solar System. It was found that the relative distances between celestial bodies were strongly underestimated overall, while the same did not hold for the relative sizes of those bodies. Moreover, as we used two different formulations to question student estimations, a systematic impact of the type of question on the magnitude of the answers was uncovered. Lastly, we also had students (dis)agree with a customized visualization and self-assess their certainty after every answer. Our findings will be discussed.

About Willem Keppens

Willem Keppens is a PhD researcher in astronomy education at KU Leuven. He previously finished his masters in Astronomy & Astrophysics at KU Leuven. His research investigates how secondary school students view the universe, and how this view is influenced by their perceptions of astronomical scales.