A Study of General Education Astronomy Students’ Understandings of Cosmology. Part V. The Effects of a New Suite of Cosmology Lecture-Tutorials on Students’ Conceptual Knowledge

Abstract

This is the final paper in a five-paper series describing our national study of the teaching and learning of cosmology in general education astronomy college-level courses. A significant portion of this work was dedicated to the development of five new Lecture-Tutorials that focus on addressing the conceptual and reasoning difficulties that our research shows students have with frequently taught cosmology topics, such as the expansion of the universe, the Big Bang, and dark matter. We conducted a systematic investigation of the implementation of these new Lecture-Tutorials and resulting learning gains in order to test the efficacy of these new Lecture-Tutorials. Our investigation included classroom observations, results from pre–post testing using four conceptual cosmology surveys, and comparisons between classes in terms of the class time spent on cosmology topics and other instructional strategies used to teach cosmology. We used this combination of qualitative and quantitative research results to evaluate the conceptual understandings of students who used the new cosmology Lecture-Tutorials compared to those students who did not. The analysis of our data shows that, in many cases, classrooms that used the cosmology Lecture-Tutorials saw a greater increase in their students’ conceptual cosmology knowledge compared to classrooms that did not use the cosmology Lecture-Tutorials. However, our results also indicate how instructors implement the Lecture-Tutorials into their classrooms strongly influences their students’ learning gains.

Keywords:

• Astronomy
• Cosmology
• Lecture-Tutorials
• Big Bang
• Expansion of the universe
• Dark matter

Acknowledgements

This project would not have been possible without the contributions of many people, including members of the Center for Astronomy Education (CAE), especially Gina Brissenden and Sébastien Cormier, and the many instructors and students who graciously agreed to participate. We owe special thanks to Kim Coble, Seth Hornstein, and Tim Chambers who helped us to review and edit early versions of the Lecture-Tutorials. We also received valuable assistance from the Physics Education Research Group at the University of Colorado at Boulder, especially Noah Finkelstein. This material is based in part upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant numbers 0833364 and 0715517, a CCLI Phase III Grant for the Collaboration of Astronomy Teaching Scholars (CATS). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.