Astronomy 116 & Science Education 116 Authoring Project

Course Goals

• Students will have a strong content background in modern Solar System astronomy in order to prepare them to teach this content at the PreK to grade 8 level
• Instructors will model teaching using the Claims-Evidence-Reasoning framework so students get experience as learners using this pedagogical method
• Students will become familiar with the unique practices of astronomy that scientists use in order to study Solar System objects

“Our goal is to not just create a textbook, but a full “Educative Curriculum”, which includes the student instructions for our investigations, a “gapless explanation” that is the storyline for the entire course that explains all of the content they will investigate and how an expert integrates those pieces into a coherent model for the formation and evolution of the Solar System, facilitation instructions for instructors, samples of student work that illustrate the types of quality explanations students provide as well as the misconceptions they often hold, videos of our instruction and student answers, and the assessments we have developed for the course.  Since this course grew out of an NSF-funded project and has previously been offered four times, we have a significant start on the writing and organization of the material, however it is not in a format that can be easily shared with others, and there is still work to do to compile and clean up what we have completed so far.  We did all of the work to allow us to do human subjects research on the teachers we worked with in the workshops and the students in our previous offerings of the class here at Penn State, so we have IRB documentation and student consent to share video and student work as part of this curriculum.  This course is very unique in that it is an interdisciplinary course that pairs a scientist and a science educator to teach cutting edge astronomy content through evidence-based pedagogical techniques.  We really wish to capture as much of this as we can so that others who may not be able to build a team like ours to co-teach the course with experts in both astronomy and K-12 pedagogy can still offer the course and have all the tools necessary to do it successfully.  We put significant resources from the NSF into the workshop and subsequent course design, we have completed a great deal of published and in preparation research to document student learning when they are taught using the curriculum we developed, and we know that teachers from the workshops and students from the PSU course have included some of the the course investigations and learning into their classrooms.  Unfortunately, the NSF award ended before we could complete the work to create the resources necessary to help grow the course within and outside of Penn State, and that’s what we hope to do through this program.”