ASTRONOMY Instruction Focus on Constructivist Epistemology
According to Webster's American Heritage Dictionary, EPISTEMOLOGY is the part of philosophy that investigates the nature and origin of knowledge (second
edition). As educators, we have come to realize that what learners achieve in the
classroom strongly depends on their prior experiences and conceptions. When pressed, even eight year olds can provide extensive descriptions of processes that cause leaves
to change color in the fall, seasonal temperature changes, formation of clouds, and
even the origin of stars. Although these in-depth explanations are usually naive
at best, these student-created conceptions of the physical world are constructed to
be internally consistent and with considerable mental effort. These naive ideas,
alternative frameworks, or misconceptions are rarely altered by the learner being
"told" the correct answer by a teacher - rather, learners either alter the incoming information
to make it internally consistent with other conceptions or discard the new information
after the test is over. To provide effective instruction, teachers and scientists
must deal with student conceptions by directly challenging students' conceptions through
observation, experience and repeated application. In contemporary education, the
teachers is a facilitator, or coach instead of a disseminator of knowledge.
The classroom founded in the tenets of constructivism requires that students to be
active pursuers of knowledge. Such classrooms are rarely quiet or orderly. They
have students working in cooperative groups, conducting investigations, and comparing
observations. This is the way that science is done by professional scientists - it is
what scientists love to do. Astronomy, in particular, is not learned from a book;
astronomy is studied by being outside and observing the world in which we live.
It is possible to uncover many of the secrets of the universe. The heavens are filled with
solar and lunar patterns of change, planet's atmospheric energy and various states
of matter, stellar stability and equilibrium, binary star systems gravitationally
interacting, Many of these are visible to the naked eye and have captivated human interest
for Centuries. Hopefully, you and your students will also be enthralled with the
study of the heavens.