Best Practices in Astronomy Education: Long-term Retention of Learning Gains with the WWT ThinkSpace Seasons Lab

Seasons is a middle school science topic where students commonly hold strong misconceptions. Ideas about seasons are so resistant to change because the Earth-Sun system is a complex, dynamic system that requires strong spatial reasoning to fully understand. Most "traditional" methods of instruction (lecture, textbook diagrams, passively-watched videos) do not adequately support students in the spatial reasoning tasks needed to understand seasons. The ThinkSpace Seasons Lab specifically targets the necessary spatial reasoning skills and strategies (for example, connecting the position of the Sun in a space-based perspective with the position in the sky in an Earth-based perspective), by blending visualizations from the WorldWide Telescope program and hands-on models. Student understanding of seasons after using the ThinkSpace curriculum increases with large effect size, and we have longitudinal data showing that two years post-instruction, students who used the ThinkSpace curriculum have stronger recollection of key seasons concepts than peers who used "traditional" curricula.