Investigating Undergraduate Student Ideas about Cosmological Concepts

As scientists seek to understand the nature of our Universe, we can also explore our students’ understanding of cosmological concepts. We will describe an ongoing study in which students’ pre-instructional ideas are examined. Approximately 1000 students have responded to open-ended questions at the start of their introductory astronomy courses. Analysis of the responses, through an iterative process of identifying self-emergent themes, suggests that students have a number of common ideas. In addition to the open-ended written surveys administered at multiple institutions, additional data from a single minority-serving institution includes in-depth student interviews, homework assignments, lab responses, and exams gathered throughout an introductory astronomy course. Results are consistent with the surveys at the beginning of the course and indicate that while students do make strides toward scientific understanding over the semester, they frequently retain some critical misunderstandings. Furthermore, results indicate that using authentic lab experiences with "real" data can address the common student pre-course ideas that scientific conclusions are simply "made up." This presentation will give an overview of our methodologies and the results for student ideas on the composition of the Universe, including dark matter and dark energy. Also see our associated presentations on student ideas of structure and distances (Camarillo et al.) and age, expansion and the Big Bang (Trouille et al.). This work was supported by NASA ROSES E/PO Grant #NNX1OAC89G, as well as by the Illinois Space Grant Consortium and National Science Foundation CCLI Grant #0632563 at Chicago State University and the Fermi E/PO program at Sonoma State University.