A Comparison of Astronomy/Science Attitudes Among Students and Secondary Teachers
Abstract
The Astronomy Summer School of East Texas was designed to address the needs of rural schools in the Walker County region of East Texas. This region is populated by poorer schools with fewer science resources and underperforming students on standardized tests, resulting in many of the school districts being rated as “academically unacceptable”. The goal of the workshop was to provide a suite of active learning modules to regional 6 - 12 grade teachers, which they can then use in their classrooms to actively engage their students in the use of real science data. As part of the workshop, we administered Zeilik’s pre/post attitude survey towards astronomy/science to assess whether the participant’s attitudes changed over the course of the two-week workshop. While we found no statistically significant shift in attitudes, we were surprised at some of the attitudes that secondary science teachers held. We will summarize their attitudes and compare them with attitude data gathered from their students, along with those of college students enrolled in introductory astronomy courses at Sam Houston State University. With this data, we will present the differences in attitudes with age between middle school, high school and college students, along with difference in attitudes between teachers and students. This project is supported by the NASA Science Mission Directorate Education and Public Outreach for Earth and Space Science (EPOESS), which is part of the Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Sciences (ROSES), Grant Number NNX12AH11G.
- Publication:
-
American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts #223
- Pub Date:
- January 2014
- Bibcode:
- 2014AAS...22344811K