The Earth's primary atmosphere, which was similar to that of the gas giant planets, was soon lost, and a secondary atmosphere was established by outgassing from the early Earth and from colliding debris. The composition of this atmosphere was probably similar to present-day volcanic emissions but with a tiny percentage of photochemically produced…

This article uses U.S. survey data (N = 15,847) to characterize the evolution of student interest in an astronomy career in the period between middle school and the beginning of college. We find that middle school students have a relatively high interest in astronomy, which sharply declines with every phase of their education. However, many of the…

In recent years information technology has been integrated into education to produce a series of trends, beginning with "electronic learning" (e-learning), through "mobile learning" (m-learning) and finally to "ubiquitous learning" (u-learning), which aims to improve learner motivation through overcoming the…

The Test Of Astronomy STandards (TOAST) is a comprehensive assessment instrument designed to measure students' general astronomy content knowledge. Built upon the research embedded within a generation of astronomy assessments designed to measure single concepts, the TOAST is appropriate to measure across an entire astronomy course. The TOAST's…

Many researchers have documented the difficulties for learners of different ages and preparations in understanding basic astronomical concepts. Traditional instructional strategies and communication media do not seem to be effective in producing meaningful understanding, or even induce misconceptions and misinterpretations. In line with recent…

Situating science concepts in concrete and authentic contexts, using information and communications technologies, including multimodal modeling tools, is important for promoting the development of higher-order thinking skills in learners. However, teachers often struggle to integrate emergent multimodal models into a technology-rich informal…

This paper presents an analysis of physics teachers' as well as university and high school students' understanding of some astronomy concepts. In recent years, the significance of astronomy teaching in science education has gradually increased. Many research studies indicate that students have misconceptions about the reasons for seasons, the…

The science education literature shows that students have difficulty understanding what causes the seasons. Incorrect explanations are often due to a lack of knowledge about the physical mechanisms underlying this phenomenon. To address this, we present a module in which the students engage in quantitative measurements with a photovoltaic panel to…

From the perspective of teaching, the huge natural laboratory that astronomy provides constitutes the most prominent connection between astronomy and other branches of science. The purpose of this research was to provide educators with activities of observation using simple materials that were developed to facilitate the teaching of basic concepts…

A pedagogical innovation was collaboratively designed, implemented and evaluated in the context of a school-university partnership. The innovation had a dual purpose: 1) to provide an opportunity for primary pre-service teachers to develop their understanding and experience of teaching "design and produce" processes (working…

The purpose of this study was to investigate how the 5E learning model affects learning about the Solar System when an analogical model is utilized in teaching. The data were gathered in an urban middle school 7th grade science course while teaching relevant astronomy topics. The analogical model developed by the researchers was administered to 20…

In this paper, we present the results from a study of the impact on students involved in a large-scale inquiry-based astronomical high school education intervention in Australia. Students in this intervention were led through an educational design allowing them to undertake an investigative approach to understanding the lifecycle of stars more…

The purpose of study is to investigate the fifth graders' understandings of the basic astronomy concept and, if they have, to define their misconceptions and then to determine what reason/s behind them. For this purpose, two hundred seventy fifth grade students from 6 different schools participated. Randomly selected 45 students performing under…

In this study, we carry out a qualitative and quantitative analysis of abbreviations in 300 randomly collected research paper titles published in the most prestigious European and US-based Astrophysics journals written in English. Our main results show that the process of shortening words and groups of words is one of the most characteristic and…

Many topics in introductory astronomy at the college or high-school level rely implicitly on using astronomical photographs and visual data in class. However, students bring many preconceptions to their understanding of these materials that ultimately lead to misconceptions, and the research about students' interpretation of astronomical images…