AAS 201st Meeting, January, 2003
Session 88. Undergraduate Astronomy Instruction, Labs and Research
Poster, Wednesday, January 8, 2003, 9:20am-6:30pm, Exhibit Hall AB

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[88.06] Teaching Introductory Astronomy Using Lecture-Tutorials

J.P. Adams (Montana State University), E.E. Prather, T.F. Slater (University of Arizona)

Contemporary science education reforms suggest that teacher-centered lectures are ineffective when compared to student-centered active learning approaches. But what is an astronomy teacher, faced with a large-enrollment course to do? Funded by the NSF, this project has developed a series of innovative classroom instructional materials for the large-enrollment, introductory science survey course for non-science and pre-service education majors. The materials package, called Lecture-Tutorials for Introductory Astronomy, is a self-contained, classroom-ready product for use with collaborative student learning groups. The materials are designed specifically to be easily integrated into the conventional lecture course. As such, this product directly addresses the needs of busy faculty and heavily-loaded teaching faculty for effective, student-centered, classroom-ready materials that do not require a drastic course revision for implementation. Each activity requires no equipment and takes 10 to 15 minutes of class time. Students are asked to reason about difficult concepts in astronomy while working in pairs and to discuss their ideas openly. The 30 Lecture-Tutorials for Introductory Astronomy are based upon educational research on student misconceptions, demonstrated effective instructional strategies, and extensive pilot and field-testing. Funding for the project was made available by NSF CCLI #9952232 and NSF Geosciences Education #9907755.


If you would like more information about this abstract, please follow the link to http://www.physics.montana.edu/physed/lecture-tutorials.html. This link was provided by the author. When you follow it, you will leave the Web site for this meeting; to return, you should use the Back comand on your browser.

The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: tslater@as.arizona.edu

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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 34, #4
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