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.