A Study of General Education Astronomy Students’ Understandings of Cosmology. Part III. Evaluating Four Conceptual Cosmology Surveys: An Item Response Theory Approach

Interpretations of cosmic expansion: anchoring conceptions and misconceptions

“…Such connections are of interest for teaching since preconceived knowledge can lead to misconceptions, but it can also aid understanding through 'anchoring conceptions' in the sense of Clement, Brown and Zietsman: elements of 'an intuitive knowledge structure that is in rough agreement with accepted physical theory', which allow for anchoring new material in learners' existing frameworks of knowledge [9]. While the present work does not include an empirical component, the results suggest ways of extending existing studies of student's cosmological conceptions and misconceptions [10][11][12] by explicitly taking into account the different roles such preconceptions play for the two competing interpretations. Such empirical work should also help to answer the question of prevalences of the various preconceptions in different subgroups of the student population; the present article, with its focus on conceptual issues, does not address that question.…”

Introductory astronomy course at the University of Cape Town: Probing student perspectives

“…This includes instruments such as the Astronomy Diagnostic Test [32][33][34][35][36], the Light and Spectroscopy Concept Inventory [37,38], the Star Properties Concept Inventory [39][40][41], the Lunar Phases Concept Inventory [42,43] and the Newtonian Gravity Concept Inventory [44,45]. In addition student understanding of cosmology was explored in detail in [46][47][48][49][50]. However we were not able to find a suitable (single) instrument that probed the range of issues that were of interest to us in this initial phase of the research.…”