Probing student understanding of scientific thinking in the context of introductory astrophysics

Common forms of testing of student understanding of science content can be misleading about their understanding of the nature of scientific thinking. Observational astronomy integrated with related ideas of force and motion is a rich context to explore the correlation between student content knowledge and student understanding of the scientific thinking about that content. In this paper, we describe this correlation in detail with a focus on a question about the relative motion of the Sun and the Earth. We find that high achieving high school students throughout New York City struggle with what constitutes scientific justification and thought processes, but can improve these skills tremendously in an inquiry-oriented summer astronomy-physics program.

Figure 1

Pretest and posttest given to all students at the beginning and end of the summer program.

Figure 2

Post-test question given to all students at the end of the summer program. Black holes were not covered.

Figure 3

Epistemological survey administered at the beginning and end of the summer program. For each item, students were asked to circle a number between 1 (strongly disagree) and 5 (strongly agree).

Figure 4

Average scores for all research methods used in this study.