Shaw-IAU Workshops by the OAE

The present work forms part of a broader programme of research aimed at understanding how pre-instruction introductory astronomy students reason when engaging with astronomy concepts. We developed an instrument, designed to probe student thinking by eliciting detailed written responses. Here we present details of the instrument and selected results from the analysis of student writing. The analysis revealed that the central idea(s) the students used to underpin their reasoning about the day-and-night cycle, was largely in agreement with the accepted astronomical explanations. However, they expressed these ideas in diverse ways. With regard to the question that probed areas that had not been formally taught (stellar twinkling), the key observation was that the majority of students drew on ideas that were deemed plausible. Additionally, where the ideas expressed did not coincide with the concepts that are central to the canonical explanation, it was clear that “sensemaking” was driving student reasoning.

About Chad Leukes

Chad Leukes is a PhD candidate in the Department of Astronomy and a part-time lecturer in the Department of Physics at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa. Chad is also an active member of the Physics and Astronomy Education Research (PhAsER) group, a collaborative group of researchers at UCT in the fields of Physics and Astronomy Education.

Chad’s research focuses on student reasoning within the context of astronomy. Chad was previously funded by the National Astrophysics and Space Science Programme (NASSP) and is currently funded by the Department of Science and Innovation’s (DSI) National Research Foundation (NRF).