Unraveling Students' Misconceptions about the Earth's Shape and Gravity

The present study was designed to test the effectiveness of a constructivist-historical teaching strategy in changing students' misconceptions about the earth's shape and gravity at the upper elementary and middle school levels. The experimental treatment was an astronomy unit in the series Great Explorations in Math and Science (GEMS), entitled "Earth, Moon, and Stars", which provides opportunities for students to clarify and articulate their understanding of the earth's shape and gravity concepts, and to modify their ideas through class discussions, creative activities, observations of the sky, and manipulating concrete models to help them explain the phenomena that they observed. The study included 539 students from 18 classrooms in 10 different states. Most of the teachers learned to present the treatment and administer and score the assessment instruments at a summer institute sponsored by the National Science Foundation. The primary experiment was a treatment-group-only design, in which the teachers administered the same test to all students before and after the treatment.[...] The results of this study support a constructivist-historical approach as fruitful in developing instructional methods and materials to help students change core concepts that are normally highly resistant to instruction. The study concludes with suggestions for further research, and for placing instruction on this topic at a strategic point in the school curriculum. (Autorenreferat übernommen. Copyright John Wiley & Sons, Inc.).