Mapping the astronomy content knowledge of Chilean in-service teachers

ABSTRACT

This paper reports a mapping of the astronomy content knowledge held by a sample of 171 Chilean in-service teachers, both from primary and secondary education, using a multiple-choice test. The responses were analysed by total achievement, and the proportion of alternative conceptions for each item was identified. Moreover, the test items were divided by Big Ideas in Astronomy and curricular topics to analyse teachers’ performance by subject, and the effect of some demographic factors was calculated. The results show a relatively low level of astronomy content knowledge and a considerable presence of alternative conceptions amongst Chilean in-service teachers, especially in day-to-day topics like diurnal motion, seasons, and Moon phases. Furthermore, we detected a significant effect on secondary teachers’ performance depending on their teaching degree and on primary teachers’ performance concerning their gender and previous participation in astronomy professional development programmes. Our outcomes offer evidence to improve astronomy teacher training, especially in the Chilean context, and contribute to the still scarce astronomy education research from the country.

KEYWORDS:

• Astronomy
• teacher knowledge
• astronomy topics

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank David Azócar, Cecilia Blanch, Diego Mardones, José Maza, and Victor Salinas from Departamento de Astronomía, Universidad de Chile for their support in this research .

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethics statement

This study was approved by the Ethics Committee of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile with the protocol ID 201009002.

Notes

1 The original Astronomy Diagnostic Test (ADT 2.0, Hufnagel, 2001), both in English and Spanish, can be found in http://solar.physics.montana.edu/aae/adt/.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo (ANID - Chile) under Grant Doctorado Nacional 2018-2118135 and Grant FONDECYT Regular 1190990.