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 [1] 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.
For this project, you will choose to develop one of the following:
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.
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:
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:
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.
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:
In the overview, I specified that you could choose to create one of the following project types:
Clearly, these are not well-defined, non-overlapping categories, but again, for example, I consider the following:
NOTE: You will be submitting your work as a single document that is in either Microsoft Word (.doc) or PDF (.pdf) format so I can open it. Try to keep your write-up for Part 1 to a page or a bit more than a page.
Please submit your work to the Capstone Project - Part 1 dropbox in Canvas by the due date indicated in our course calendar.
You will not receive a separate grade for Part 1, as you will receive one grade on the overall project. However, I will be providing feedback on Part 1, so you will simply receive a check that I received your Part 1 submission by the deadline, which is typically mid-week during our work on Lesson 9.
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.
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:
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. [5])
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:
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.
NOTE: You will be submitting your work as a single document that is in either Microsoft Word (.doc) or PDF (.pdf) format so I can open it. Try to keep your write-up for Part 2 to a reasonable length. I will not provide a strict page count, but think you should keep it succinct and only use the number of pages you find necessary to answer the questions above completely.
CapstonePart2_AccessAccountID_LastName.doc (or .pdf).
For example, student Elvis Aaron Presley's file would be named "CapstonePart2_eap1_presley.doc" - This naming convention is important, as it will help me make sure I match each submission with the right student!
Please submit your work to the Capstone Project - Part 2 dropbox in Canvas by the due date indicated on our course calendar.
You will not receive a separate grade for Part 2, as you will receive one grade on the overall project. However, I will be providing feedback on Part 2, so you will simply receive a check that I received your Part 2 submission by the deadline, which is typically 3 weeks after Part 1 is due.
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:
The topics you should address in discussing the appropriateness for your audience might include:
During your discussion of your implementation plan, you should elaborate on your description from Part 2. For example, you might:
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.
Note: You will be submitting your work as a single document that is in either Microsoft Word (.doc) or PDF (.pdf) format so I can open it. There is no minimum page limit, but I expect it should take at least one page to address the requirements for the summary.
CapstonePart3_AccessAccountID_LastName.doc (or .pdf).
For example, student Elvis Aaron Presley's file would be named "CapstonePart3_eap1_presley.doc" - This naming convention is important, as it will help me make sure I match each submission with the right student!
Please submit your work to the Capstone Project - Part 3 dropbox in Canvas by the due date indicated on our course calendar, which is usually mid-week during finals week, three weeks after Part 2 is due.
See the grading rubric [6] for specifics on how this assignment will be graded.
Below are some resources related to the Capstone Project:
Have another website or printed piece on this topic that you have found useful? Share it in our Comment space below!
Links
[1] http://www.nap.edu/catalog/13165/a-framework-for-k-12-science-education-practices-crosscutting-concepts
[2] http://www.spacescience.org/education/extra/kinesthetic_astronomy/index.html
[3] http://cas.sdss.org/dr5/en/proj/teachers/advanced/hr/
[4] http://astro.unl.edu/classaction/
[5] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/astro801/sites/www.e-education.psu.edu.astro801/files/Blooms_ActionVerbs.pdf
[6] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/astro801/node/2078
[7] http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=4962
[8] http://amazing-space.stsci.edu/resources/explorations/
[9] http://chandra.harvard.edu/edu/formal/index.html
[10] http://www3.gettysburg.edu/~marschal/clea/CLEAhome.html
[11] http://phet.colorado.edu/index.php
[12] http://www.lawrencehallofscience.org/gems/GEMSSeasons.html
[13] http://www.lawrencehallofscience.org/gems/gemsInvUniv.html