Methodological issues in exploring students' ideas about elementary astronomy

Scientific Essay from the year 2011 in the subject Didactics - Common Didactics Educational Objectives Methods grade: Distinction University of Leeds (School of Education/Centre for Studies in Science and Mathematics Education) language: English abstract: This study investigates the methods and the questions or the tasks used for researching students' ideas in the domain of elementary cosmology mostly in primary education. Astronomy seems to be fertile and attractive. This is mostly because in many ways the scientific perspective of the Earth and relative concepts is contrary to intuition or common-sense and contrary to appearance. For instance the Sun seems to move on the horizon during daylight hours but actually it is the Earth that spins on its axes giving that impression. Young students' developing understanding of the Earth and relative phenomena provides a fascinating natural experiment in the sources of young children's developing scientific knowledge. Most studies in this area involve children's understanding of the shape of the Earth the force of gravity and simple astronomical phenomena such as the day/night cycle.In the last forty years students' understanding and ideas of scientific phenomena have been of considerable interest to researches in the field of science education. In Mouly's (1978) words the aim of a research is to promote progress and enable people to resolve their conflicts. In a similar vein the purpose of the researches in science education is to ensure maturity and progression of education where lacks exist (Cohen and others 2000). Nevertheless in some cases the findings of such studies are not consistent and as a result there is disagreement about whether a lack exists or not. Several researchers have claimed that this inconsistency is related with the research approaches using different methods and reaching different conclusions.Generally speaking the word method concerns those techniques of eliciting answers to