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A Study of General Education Astronomy Students’ Understandings of Cosmology. Part IV. Common Difficulties Students Experience with Cosmology
A Study of General Education Astronomy Students’ Understandings of Cosmology. Part IV. Common Difficulties Students Experience with Cosmology
Abstract
This is our fourth paper in our five paper series describing our national study of general education astronomy students’ conceptual and reasoning difficulties with cosmology. While previous papers in this series focused on the processes by which we collected and quantitatively analyzed our data, this paper presents the most common pre-instruction conceptual and reasoning difficulties identified from our qualitative analysis of students’ written responses. We discuss students’ naı¨ve ideas about the expansion and evolution of the universe, the Big Bang, interpreting Hubble plots, and the evidence for dark matter in spiral galaxies.
Date
01/01/2012
Citation
Wallace, C. S., Prather, E. E., & Duncan, D. K. (2012). A Study of General Education Astronomy Students’ Understandings of Cosmology. Part IV. Common Difficulties Students Experience with Cosmology. Astronomy Education Review, 11(1). https://doi.org/10.38
Center for Astronomy Education (CAE), Steward Observatory, University of Arizona | Center for Astronomy Education (CAE), Steward Observatory, University of Arizona | Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences, University of Colorado at Boulder