Factors Contributing to Attitudinal Gains in Introductory Astronomy Courses

Abstract

Most students do not enroll in introductory astronomy as part of their major; For many, it is the last science course they will ever take. Thus, it has great potential to shape students' attitudes toward STEM fields for the rest of their life. We therefore argue that it is less important, when assessing the effectiveness of introductory astronomy courses, to explore traditional curricular learning gains than to explore the effects that various course components have on this attitude. We describe the results of our analysis of end-of-semester surveys returned by a total of 749 students in 2014-2015, at 10 institutions that employed at least part of the introductory astronomy lecture and lab curriculum we first implemented at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2009. Surveys were designed to measure each student's attitude, and to probe the correlation of attitude with their utilization of, and satisfaction with, various course components, along with other measures of their academic background and their self-assessed performance in the course. We find that students' attitudes are significantly positively correlated with the grade they expect to receive, and with their rating of the course's overall effectiveness. To a lesser degree, we find that students' attitudes are positively correlated with their mathematical background, with whether they intend to major or pursue a career in STEM, and with their rating of the effectiveness of the instructor. We find that students' attitudes are negatively correlated with the amount of work they perceived the course to involve, and, surprisingly, with the size and reputation of their home institution. We also find that, for the subsets of students who were exposed to them, students' attitudes are positively correlated with their perception of the helpfulness of the lecture component of the course, and of telescope-based labs that utilized UNC-CH's Skynet Robotic Telescope Network.

Development and validation of an astronomy self-efficacy instrument for understanding and doing

“…Studies have found that often the students expect the research experience to be like their college laboratory experience [37,38]. Early scientific research experiences, or experiences with research instrumentation, have been shown to increase students' science self-efficacy as well as their science identity [39][40][41] and help retain students in undergraduate science courses [42][43][44]. Self-efficacy is also a key mediator in identity development [39] and therefore this study developed a specific indicator for astronomy self-efficacy in both knowledge and user instrumentation.…”

“…With the rapid growth of remote telescope technology and programs for students to use this technology [95,96], understanding the impact of these on student outcomes is important. It is a professionally shared, but as yet not robustly tested, opinion that using a researchgrade telescope during a course improves students' selfefficacy and makes them feel like they "can do" astronomy [44,97,98] albeit when executed with careful focus on quality educational design [99]. Promising initial work has shown a correlation between self-efficacy and positive attitudes in robotic telescope undergraduate courses [43], however, positive shifts at the high school level have so far not been measured [100].…”