Astronomy

The American Astronomical Society’s WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a visualization program that enables a computer to function as a virtual telescope—bringing together archival imagery from the world’s best ground- and space-based telescopes for the exploration of the universe. It is a powerful resource for astronomy education. In this chapter, we describe curricula developed by the authors that use WWT in teaching key topics in Astro 101 and K–12 science, including parallax, Hubble’s Law and large-scale structure in the universe, seasons, Moon phases and eclipses, and life in the universe.

Collection of 158 free interactive math and science simulations from University of Colorado Boulder. Engage students in math and science practices, and virtual labs, during remote learning. Find over 2,000 sim-based lessons under teacher resources. 

Collection of 158 free interactive math and science simulations from University of Colorado Boulder. Engage students in math and science practices, and virtual labs, during remote learning. Find over 2,000 sim-based lessons under teacher resources. 

Collection of 158 free interactive math and science simulations from University of Colorado Boulder. Engage students in math and science practices, and virtual labs, during remote learning. Find over 2,000 sim-based lessons under teacher resources. 

Collection of 158 free interactive math and science simulations from University of Colorado Boulder. Engage students in math and science practices, and virtual labs, during remote learning. Find over 2,000 sim-based lessons under teacher resources. 

Collection of 158 free interactive math and science simulations from University of Colorado Boulder. Engage students in math and science practices, and virtual labs, during remote learning. Find over 2,000 sim-based lessons under teacher resources. 

Gould, R. R., S. Sunbury, & Dussault, M. (2014). In praise of messy data: Lessons from the search for alien worlds. The Science Teacher, 31.

The search for habitable planets offers excellent opportunities to advance students’ understanding of core ideas in physics, including gravity and the laws of motion, the interaction of light and matter, and especially the nature of scientific inquiry. Thanks to the development of online telescopes, students can detect more than a dozen of the known exoplanets from the classroom, using data they gather, assess, and interpret for themselves. We present a suite of activities in which students apply basic physics concepts to their investigations of exoplanets.

Shifting people’s judgments toward the scientific involves teaching them to purposefully evaluate connections between evidence and alternative explanations.

Lombardi, D. (2019). Thinking scientifically in a changing world. Science Brief: Psychological Science Agenda, 33(1). Retrieved from https://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2019/01/changing-world.aspx

Critical evaluation underpins the practices of science. In a three-year classroom-based research project, we developed and tested instructional scaffolds for Earth science content in which students evaluate lines of evidence with respect to alternative explanations of scientific phenomena (climate change, fracking and earthquakes, wetlands and land use, and formation of Earth’s Moon).