Astronomy Education K-12

Astronomy Education K-12
A paper presented at the American Astronomical Society Meeting
on 13 January 1997, Toronto
by Mary Kay Hemenway in the session
Astronomy Education: Current Developments and Trends




Reference BAAS 28, 1304, 1996 (abstract 23.03)

abstract The publication in 1983 of "A Nation at Risk" focused attention on the problems of science and mathematics education within the United States. Concerns about astronomy have arisen as part of the general uproar, but astronomy is not yet a major consideration for most educators. In 1994-5 there were 84,715 public schools with a total of 44.1 million students in the US. Their curriculum is most often set through local rules by each of 14,400 districts. (An additional 4.8 million students attended 26,000 private schools.) The emergence of national standards (most notably through Project 2061's Benchmarks and the National Science Education Standards) holds out the promise of astronomy for all students. This paper will examine the role of astronomy within the national standards and how several national astronomy education projects are committed to providing more access to astronomy within the school setting.

Text: For the almost 50 million school children in the US, there are tens of thousands of mostly independent decision-making entities that affect the structure and curriculum for science education. In addition to this diversity of views and lack of structure, there are other problems facing the teaching of science. Although 8% of the gross national product is spent on education, many teachers may be lacking the resources to do so well.
A vision of science education for the US is given in the National Science Education Standards (published in late 1995 by the National Research Council). They have the following Guiding Principles:

The Standards cover many areas: Teaching, Professional Development, Assessment, Content, Program, and System. The AAS focus group on the standards provided input concerning many of the standards, but especially focused on the content concerning Astronomy. The standards also provide guidance for scientists concerning their role in the overall system.

Implementing the standards is a long-range goal. The following statistics are taken from "A Profile of Science and Mathematics Education in the United States: 1993" [copyright 1994 by Iris R. Weiss of Horizon Research Inc., 111 Cloister Court, Chapel Hill, NC 27514]. These show how distant the current situation is from the vision of the standards:

In grades 1-6, the average time per day spent on science instruction is only 27 minutes per day. 26% of this time is hands-on instruction.
Concerning science in-service instruction for teachers which totaled more than 15 hours over the past three years (that is, an average of 5 hours or more per year): only 23% of teachers in grades 1-4 had this much, only 34% of grade 5-8, and 56% of grade 9-12 (where most science teachers are science specialists).
Even more revealing is the amount of funds teachers had available for consumable supplies for their science classrooms each year: In elementary grades it is $0.51 per student; in middle school, $0.88 per student; and in high school, $2.22 per student. With this level of support for both in-service and supplies, the scope of the problem is even more apparent.

The following is a list of some current astronomy education projects which are providing inservice or other resources.
AAS: American Astronomical Society Teacher Resource Agents (my program which has prepared 215 teachers to serve as resource agents, especially as workshop presenters, across the US. So far it has provided about 5000 teachers with an activity based workshop of average length 3 hours).

AAVSO: Hands-On Astrophysics This program is developing a data-base of a million actual observations which can be used by students in their research. It also offers instruction on how students can add to the data base. It is currently being field-tested by teachers and their students.

ASP: Project ASTRO. This program for partnering astronomers and teachers has been described by the first speaker at this session (Andrew Fraknoi).

Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
LBL: Hands-On Universe -- Carl Pennypacker's goal is to involved 720 teachers by 1998 in this project, which is described in a poster paper at this AAS meeting. Again, the goal to have students work with real data. They can request that remote telescopes make an observation, and find the data at school the next day for their analysis.

SETI Institute: Life in the Universe Project. Classroom kits (books with activities, posters, videos) for grades 3-4, 5-6, 7-8, 8-9.

Univ. Arizona LPL: Image Processing for Teaching Real data including weather, health issues, and astronomy from the Internet for students to process.

UC-Berkeley: NASA Science Information Infrastructure curricula and workshops -- workshops and activities available at their web site.

Summary: Although there seem to be a lot of projects aimed at grades K-12, they only reach a small fraction of the students. All astronomers are invited to follow National Standards and become involved in K-12 education on a level with which they feel comfortable. 


This document originated on 4 February 1997;  links were updated on 07 August 2002
Mary Kay Hemenway's Selected Publications