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G. Brissenden (American Astronomical Society), D.H. Bruning (Univ. of Wisc.-Parkside, Dept. of Pysics), T.F. Slater (Univ. of Arizona, Dept. of Astronomy)
One of the greatest challenges in surveying the existing literature in astronomy education research is that it is spread across tens of journals. Currently, astronomy education research articles appear in the journals primarily servicing science education, science teaching, teacher education, curriculum and instruction, cognitive science, and informal education. Indeed, it is this lack of a central place for publishing the results of astronomy education research that has motivated, in part, the creation of a new electronic astronomy education journal, Astronomy Education Review (AER).
In a concerted effort to collect, summarize, and make more accessible the widely dispersed knowledge-base of astronomy education research, members of the AAS Working Group on Astronomy Education have volunteered to sift through 35 journals and identify all articles from 1970 to the present that are relevant to astronomy education. For our purposes, relevant astronomy education research articles are those refereed papers that describe quantitative and qualitative research methods and results about teaching, learning, and assessment in astronomy and space science. The group has collaboratively created an annotated bibliography that summarizes these articles in an online database that is electronically searchable. Here we present the annotated bibliography to the astronomical community, provide additional background information on its contents, and give information on how to access the database online.
Initial funding for the programming and design of the search engine was provided, in part, by the Wisconsin Space Grant Consortium and the American Astronomical Society.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: gina@aas.org