Perspectives on astronomy: probing Norwegian pre-service teachers and middle school students

Abstract

We report on ongoing work to gain insight into the astronomy knowledge and perspectives of pre-service teachers and middle school students in Norway. We carefully adapted and translated into Norwegian an existing instrument, the Introductory Astronomy Questionnaire (IAQ); we administered this adapted IAQ to (i) pre-service teachers at the largest teacher education institution in Norway, and (ii) students drawn from eight middle schools in Oslo, in both cases before and after astronomy instruction. Amongst our preliminary findings - based on an analysis of both free-response writing and multiple-choice responses - was that when prompted to provide responses to hypothetical students, the pre-service teachers exhibited a marked drop in pedagogical responses pre- to post-instruction, with corresponding shifts towards more authoritative responses. We also identified potentially serious issues relating to middle school students' conceptions of size and distances in the universe, with significant stratification along gender lines.