This study aims to assess primary school teachers' knowledge of basic astronomy concepts, such as the sizes and shapes of, and the distances between, the Sun, the Earth, and the Moon, lunar and solar eclipses, and the motions of the Moon and the Earth. Out of a total of 1,533 teachers, 398 (26%) were reached and asked to take a knowledge test. On the knowledge test, the overall performance of the teachers, whose task it is to teach the astronomy concepts in the fifth grade Science and Technology curriculum, stands at 70% while the students' success rate is approximately 50%. It is noteworthy that approximately one out of every three teachers answered the questions incorrectly. In this study, the primary school teachers' low performance on the same questions as the students can be observed as an indicator of this. Placing an astronomy course in undergraduate level in the elementary school teacher-training program could be useful. Thus, pre-service teachers have enough knowledge regarding astronomy subjects before starting their careers.
IntroductionMost people think of astronomy as a set of concepts that are irrelevant to daily life and quite difficult to grasp. In fact, astronomy is at the centre of our daily lives, guiding us in matters ranging from measuring time to forming calendars and from understanding daily meteorological events to long-term climate changes. As an indispensable part of our daily lives, astronomy facilitates rational thinking and allows us to understand the nature of science, which correlates with how accurately and effectively astronomy is taught. When astronomy concepts are properly learned, students' perception, comprehension, and three-dimensional thinking skills improve, which, in turn, facilitates the learning of other abstract concepts that occur in science education. Although astronomy is the oldest branch of science, studies on its teaching do not go back particularly far. With the launch of the Sputnik into space in 1957, studies on the teaching of astronomy began to proliferate, and during this process, developed countries have restructured their educational curricula both to maintain their pace in the space race and to familiarise their citizens with scientific concepts. This restructuring brought the teaching of astronomy to the foreground and, to this end, gave rise to a large body of recent research on how-and how much-people understand the basic concepts of astronomy (Lelliott & Rollnick, 2010). These studies mostly focus on primary school, secondary school, and university students' as well as student-teachers' knowledge of basic astronomy (Kalkan & Kiroglu, 2007;Trumper, 2001a;Zeilik, Schau, & Mattern, 1998), and the studies reveal major difficulties regarding the understanding of such concepts as the sizes and shapes of, and the distances between, the Sun, the Earth, and the Moon, lunar and solar eclipses, and the motions of the Moon and the Earth. In their study with first-, third-, and fifth-year primary school pupils on the day and night cycle, Vosniadou and Brewer (199...