Abstract:

Using natural phenomena to scaffold children’s inner interest in doing questions and seeking for answers are current orientations to early childhood education. Recent research has shown that children at preschool bring unsuspected abilities in learning. Since some elementary astronomic phenomena are an everyday experience they should integrate the pool of resources from which the educators withdraw their material to promote an intentional teaching.

This brings to the fore the assessment of pre-service teacher education in basic astronomic phenomena, their previous education in this subject and the robust misconceptions they hold.

This communication reports a study on the misconceptions held by pre-service elementary teachers and educators in a higher education institution in Lisbon. We had developed and validate a closed questionnaire constructed to probe the understanding of basic astronomic phenomena (day and night, moon phases and movements, earth movements, stars and constellations). In the answers provided in the questionnaire was misconceptions reported in the literature, so they could be assessed.

The questionnaire was applied in 2017 and 2018 before and after the teaching and learning module of astronomy. Here we will work on the answers obtained in 2017 and on those answers obtained in the application of the questionnaire in 2018 before the teaching and learning module.

After a descriptive statistical analysis to the responses of the questionnaire, we proceed to group the answers in main alternative conceptions and assess how prevalent they were among pre-service teachers before they attend the module in elementary astronomy, and which misconceptions were robust enough to resist to the teaching and learning module to a high degree.

The results show, as expected, a similar distribution of misconceptions before the teaching and learning module. The Moon movements and its phases are poorly understood; the explanation for the seasons rest largely in the distance to the Sun framework; the apparent movement of the stars (and constellations) in the sky are detached from the apparent diurnal movement of the Sun. Scales are poorly understood and the Universe is seen much smaller than he is.

We conclude showing how the two main conceptual change frameworks, the Vosniadou’s ‘Framework theory” and Di Sessa’s “knowledge in pieces” explain our results and hint on what future work can improve our teaching and learning on elementary astronomy.

Keywords:

Elementary astronomy, pre-service teachers, conceptual change.