Student Ideas about Cosmological Concepts: Structure and Distances

Cosmology is a field of study that is rapidly advancing our current knowledge of the Universe. As the field advances, it is of interest to study how student ideas relate to scientific understanding. We describe an on-going study pertaining to students’ cosmological concepts of structure and distances. The study was conducted in an urban minority-serving institution’s Basic Astronomy course. The students who take this course have a diverse background of majors. Through a repeated measures design, student ideas regarding structure and distances are collected

from the beginning to the end of the course. The instruments implemented are homework essays, pre-tests surveys (before lab), exams (after lab), lab comments, and individual interviews. Students hold an array of mental representations and ideas about the Universe’s structure and distances at the start of the course. Several of these different ideas may be based on misinterpreting scales or pictures. As the course continues, students tend to change several of their cosmological concepts to be more in line with scientific understanding. For instance, final exams tend to show a slightly better understanding of the Universe compared to initial homework essays and exams. However, individual interviews and other data reveal that some previous ideas regarding structure and distance can persist and may interfere with learning. Also see our presentations on student ideas of expansion and the Big Bang (Trouille et al.) as well as the overview of our methodology (Coble 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.