Sources of Misconceptions in Astronomy

In this paper I describe a program I have begun to identify misconceptions about
astronomy and to understand their origins and how they are replaced with new concepts. I begin
by describing the protocols used for each part of the project. The data for this work comes from
undergraduate college students at the University of Maine who take the (non-mathematical)
Introductory Astronomy course I teach. In three semesters of this work 396 students have so far
participated in the misconception-gathering part of the program. Of these, seventy-five were also
involved in focus groups and writing about the origins and replacement of their misconceptions.
Of the 5,500 misconceptions stated by the cohort, I have identified 553 separate misconceptions.
Many of these misconceptions are described in various contexts below. I end by presenting a set
of internal and external origins of these misconceptions I have derived from the lists and from
the focus groups.