Teacher’s misconception in curricular astronomy

Abstract

Misconceptions about astronomy concepts are found quite regularly in students, even after they have taken astronomy courses. There are numerous reasons for this [1, 2]. The authors in this paper have focused on the possibility that the existence of these misconceptions could be attributed to the misconceptions of the teacher-instructor and its transmission down to the students that he/she has been teaching. Keeping this in mind, the authors have prepared a questionnaire consisting of assertions split into 5 sections. The teacher-instructors were asked to gauge the truthfulness of the assertions in a survey. The responses to the section on Calendars and the section on Sun and Moon are covered in this article. It was concluded that the respondents of the survey face serious skill deficits in imparting conceptually correct astronomical knowledge to their students. This deficit in skill is not only due to a lack of information on the subject but also due to an inability/unwillingness of the teacher-instructor to make logical inferences/extensions from the knowledge he/she does possess on the topic.