We describe a pen and paper instrument designed to provide a measure of a range of student beliefs about thermal phenomena. The trial version, administered to 478 high school and university students aged 15–18 years, was able to distinguish belief changes in two populations, year 11 and first-year university physics students. We have used the revised instrument as a pre-test and post-test for evaluating students’ conceptual change following instruction. The instrument, called the Thermal Concept Evaluation, is appended.

Conclusiones que en relación a la enseñanza del calor, nos llevan a afirmar que nos encontramos en medio del camino que nos presenta Lavoisier (1948).

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The Einstein-First project aims to change the paradigm of school science teaching through the introduction of modern Einsteinian concepts of space and time, gravity and quanta at an early age. These concepts are rarely taught to school students despite their central importance to modern science and technology. The key to implementing the Einstein-First curriculum is the development of appropriate models and analogies. This paper is the first part of a three-paper series. It presents the conceptual foundation of our approach, based on simple physical models and analogies, followed by a detailed description of the models and analogies used to teach concepts of general and special relativity. Two accompanying papers address the teaching of quantum physics (Part 2) and research outcomes (Part 3).

In order to study the light pollution produced in the city of Perth, Western Australia, we have used a hand-held sky brightness meter to measure the night sky brightness across the city. The data acquired facilitated the creation of a contour map of night sky brightness across the 2400 km(2) area of the city - the first such map to be produced for a city. Importantly, this map was created using a methodology borrowed from the field of geophysics - the well proven and rigorous techniques of geostatistical analysis and modelling.\ud A major finding of this study is the effect of land use on night sky brightness. By overlaying the night sky brightness map on to a suitably processed Landsat satellite image of Perth we found that locations near commercial and/or light industrial areas have a brighter night sky, whereas locations used for agriculture or having high vegetation coverage have a fainter night sky than surrounding areas. Urban areas have intermediate amounts of vegetation and are intermediate in brightness compared with the above-mentioned land uses. Regions with a higher density of major highways also appear to contribute to increased night sky brightness.\ud When corrected for the effects of direct illumination from high buildings, we found that the night sky brightness in the central business district (CBD) is very close to that expected for a city of Perth's population from modelling work and observations obtained in earlier studies. Given that our night sky brightness measurements in Perth over 2009 and 2010 are commensurate with that measured in Canadian cities over 30 years earlier implies that the various lighting systems employed in Perth (and probably most other cities) have not been optimised to minimize light pollution over that time.\ud We also found that night sky brightness diminished with distance with an exponent of approximately -0.25 +/- 0.02 from 3.5 to 10 km from the Perth CBD, a region characterized by urban and commercial land use. For distances from 10 out to about 40 km from the CBD the radial variation of night sky brightness steepens to have an exponent value of approximately -1.8 +/- 0.2. This steepening is associated with land use because vegetation cover increases with further distance from the CBD