Integrating Practice-Based Activities and Visual Representations to Foster Students’ Understanding of Basic Astronomy Phenomena: An Example about Seasonal Changes

Abstract This study investigates how different combinations of practice-based activities and visual representations affect students’ learning about seasonal changes. We adopted a pre-post 3 × 2 experimental design in which we first randomly assigned 12 intact 9th-grade classes ( N = 337 students) to either a “practice-based activity” or a “no practice-based activity” and then to one of the following conditions: “specially designed images”; “textbook images”; “no images”. We used a draw-and-explain task and a mixed multiple-choice true/false questionnaire, the Seasons Concepts Inventory (SCI), to assess students’ conceptual understanding of seasons before and after participating to one of the teaching conditions. Data were analyzed using a 2-way between subjects factorial analysis of variance (ANOVA). The results indicate a significant interaction effect between the experimental conditions. Students in the “practice-based activity” condition outperformed students in the “no practice-based activity” condition, regardless of the type of image used. However, the students in the “specially designed images” condition performed significantly better than those in the “textbook images” and “no images” conditions in both the draw-and-explain task and the SCI instrument, regardless of the practice-based activity condition. Furthermore, the students in the “no practice-based activity” condition who were taught with the specially designed images did not perform significantly different from the students in the “practice-based activity” condition who were taught with the same types of images. Our study has implications for astronomy education practice in that it shows advantages and limitations of combining two approaches that are usually implemented separately. This study has also broader educational implications in that it demonstrates that when combining two different teaching approaches, the effectiveness of each approach may depend on the specific combination adopted.