My philosophy for the course and the project

This course is a true survey of astronomy. Although topics have been covered in some depth, in order to cover all of them, you have been referred to a host of additional resources that you may have investigated already or can follow up with after the course ends. You presented to each other additional resources that you find useful to help explain some of the concepts we covered in the course, too. In some cases, you were asked to discuss specifically how you teach some of the topics you studied in ASTRO 801.

This course was constructed by piecing together what I consider to be excellent resources available from NASA, other universities, Starry Night, and a few that I and my colleagues have created. I fully expect all of you to take what you find useful and incorporate those into your teaching.

I am not an expert in pedagogy at the K-12 level, but I have read some of the research and conducted my own on teaching and learning of astronomy. I have studied the PA state standards, the National Science Education Standards, and most recently the Framework for K-12 Science Education and the Next Generation Science Standards. In particular, the NSES emphasizes the need for science teaching to increasingly rely on inquiry-based techniques, and the NGSS talks describe the integration of science practices and science content in the K-12 classroom. I have adopted many of these in my teaching, and when I teach face- to-face professional development workshops for teachers, I model inquiry-based activities and find these to be the most successful at transferring knowledge.

Given the emphasis on these types of pedagogies in most science methods courses at universities and in the education literature, I am going to focus our capstone activity on inquiry-based activities.

Capstone Project Overview

For this project, you will choose to develop one of the following:

1. An inquiry-based classroom activity
2. A laboratory exercise
3. A detailed learning object (unless you are an experienced programmer, you will not submit a working learning object, but a storyboard for one)

Examples of each are provided on the next page.

The overall project will be broken up into three parts, presented on the next few pages.

• Part 1: Topic, Audience, & Project Type
• Part 2: Learning Objectives & Detailed Project Description
• Part 3: Final Project Report

At the end of this project, you should have a written report that provides enough detail for you and your classmates to teach the content area that you have chosen. To begin to focus your project, I would like you to concentrate on these three areas:

1. Topic
2. Audience
3. Project Type

Select a topic

Part of your grade will depend on how relevant your topic is to the content you have studied in this course. I would like you to choose a topic area that fits broadly into planets, stars, galaxies, and the Universe. You can choose a topic that we studied in depth, one that we covered briefly and you would like to study further, or one that we skipped, but still falls into the broad categories we studied.

Examples include:

• Stellar evolution: The proposed activity presents the stellar evolution of a Sun-like star in an innovative manner that is superior in some ways to the way we looked at it in this course.
• Black holes: The proposed activity presents the relativistic effects one would experience when encountering a black hole in more depth than it is presented in a previous lesson.
• The nature of blue stragglers: The proposed activity presents the stellar evolution of the type of stars known as blue stragglers, which are similar to, but different from any we studied in our lessons.

An example of a topic that I would consider not relevant to the course for this project is something related directly to human spaceflight in Earth orbit. For example, if you propose to focus your project on the growth of vegetables in the International Space Station to feed the astronauts, I would recommend you choose differently. However, if you want to talk about the nature of orbits and celestial mechanics by an investigation of how rockets get humans to the Moon and back, that is much more relevant and a good option for our project.  If you are unsure if I would consider your topic relevant, please contact me for early feedback prior to submitting your work for Part 1.

Identify the audience

You should also focus your project to the audience. You are welcome to choose the audience you would like to work with, for example, you might choose:

• One class of 6th-grade students: If you teach 6th graders, you should certainly create a project that will work for you to teach your students!
• High school physics classes: You can create a project that is appropriate for students in high school physics classes, which may be a mix of ages of students, depending on the school.
• Informal education: Perhaps you work with out of school groups, such as scout troops, 4-H clubs, or robotics clubs. You can choose to design a project for these mixed age clubs that have different requirements and expectations than a formal classroom.

Choose a project type

In the overview, I specified that you could choose to create one of the following project types:

1. An inquiry-based activity
2. A laboratory exercise, or
3. A learning object.

Clearly, these are not well-defined, non-overlapping categories, but again, for example, I consider the following:

• Inquiry-based activity: Kinesthetic Astronomy teaches the 3D Sun / Earth orbital relationship by having students act out the Earth's orbit kinesthetically.
• Laboratory exercise: The SDSS HR Diagram lab we completed has students create HR diagrams using real astronomical data.
• Learning object: The ClassAction Phases of the Moon module is a set of learning objects that teachers can use to supplement classroom instruction on the phases of the Moon.

Now that you have a topic, audience, and a project type chosen for your capstone project, you can refine your lesson by defining the specific learning outcomes that you want your audience to take away from your activity. Once you have your outcomes defined, the details of your project should be chosen so that audience members who perform the activity, do the lab, or use the learning object achieve those outcomes.

Defining learning outcomes

You have leeway within your chosen topic to define exactly what you want students to take away after completing the activity or lab or after using the learning object you are planning to describe. As you know from your education background, learning outcomes are statements that specify what learners will know or be able to do as a result of a learning activity. They are typically expressed as knowledge, skills, or attitudes.

In Part 1, I used a Kinesthetic Astronomy activity as an example. Let's also use it as an example for defining learning outcomes. If you download the lesson, a number of outcomes are stated, including:

• Demonstrate why we see different constellations in the night sky at different times of the year.
• Reason correctly in addressing the question of whether people in the US tonight will see the same stars that people in China saw last night (assuming everyone is observing from the same latitude).

Your learning outcomes should be stated as succinctly as the examples taken from that lesson. Furthermore, they should be measurable. A learning outcome that says, for example, that a student will "understand why we see different constellations in the night sky at different times of the year" doesn't indicate how one would know if that were achieved. It is too vague. The verb "demonstrate" does a better job of indicating how that outcome would be measured. (See more examples of action verbs for learning outcomes.)

Detailed project description

You should provide a project description that includes enough detail that someone else could replicate the activity, lab, or use of the learning object. Please use any template you are comfortable with or create your own document from scratch, but your description should include the following categories of information:

1. A brief description of the background astronomy content that explains, in detail, what the students will actually do and how that addresses your science content area.
2. A list of any materials they will need and instructions for using those materials to complete the activity, lab, or learning object.
3. A description of what the students will deliver at the end of the activity, lab, or learning object (e.g., a lab report, a paper, etc.).
4. A rubric that you will use to evaluate their work.

If you have chosen to create a learning object for your project, you should present a storyboard for that learning object to address #1 above. If you do not intend the students to directly interact with it (e.g., you will present it as an in-class demo), you should still describe what the students will do during the lesson that incorporates that learning object as an answer to #2 - 4 in the list above.

For this final part of the capstone project, I would like you to produce one last document that incorporates your previous two parts but also summarizes your overall vision for your new lesson. Your final report should include the following:

1. Part 1—the topic, audience, and project type.
2. Part 2—the detailed project description.
3. Part 3—A detailed final summary of the project as a whole, which should include why it is appropriate for the audience you chose and your implementation plan (i.e., how you expect you or others might implement it).

The topics you should address in discussing the appropriateness for your audience might include:

• Does it address state or national standards for the grade level you chose?
• Is the project type appropriate for out of class time if you chose to create an activity for a club?
• Will the project fit naturally into the typical curriculum for a grade level?

During your discussion of your implementation plan, you should elaborate on your description from Part 2. For example, you might:

• Provide a scenario that describes how you would interact with your students as they undertake the project.
• Compare and contrast your project with a similar lesson you teach currently.

Your summary does not need to be long, but it does need to be complete and address both aspects described above. The final report should be a single, complete project that provides the reader all of the information and instruction necessary for the implementation of your project at their institution.

Below are some resources related to the Capstone Project:

1. The National Science Education Standards include examples of the types of inquiry-based lessons that you may wish to describe in your project.
2. Most of the resources that you have seen throughout the course are examples of the types of activities, labs, and learning objects that you can use for inspiration for your projects. However, let me list a few that I consider to be the best and that you can look at as exemplars:

• All of the Hubblesite "Amazing Space" online explorations
• The Chandra Educational Materials classroom-ready activities
• The Gettysburg CLEA laboratories
• The ClassAction Modules
• The Colorado PhET simulations
• There are no online versions you can read, but I also recommend the GEMS guides "The Real Reasons for Seasons" and "Invisible Universe."