A Holistic View of Using Real and Virtual Models in Teaching Astronomy Concepts

Students construct mental models as internal symbolic representations based on their observations of occurrences and events to comprehend the world around them. Various methods have been reported to diagnose students' misconceptions among which questionnaires with multimodality characteristics that can be utilized as tools for detecting learners' alternate perceptions. The objective of this study was to assess the efficacy of two pedagogical approaches, namely a self-constructed tangible model and a 3D virtual model, in terms of learning outcomes related to astronomy concepts and phenomena. The study encompassed every aspect of a didactic course path, including identification and assessment of alternative ideas, diagnostic evaluation, final evaluation, and fostering of meta-cognitive skills. Our research sample consists of 105 Junior high school students, aged thirteen to fifteen, coming from six different classes. The research approach included students' ideas detection, a teaching intervention and analysis of the results. A mixed method approach (quantitative and qualitative) was followed for validity and reliability reasons. Research revealed that the use of a well-designed model (real or virtual) may comprehensively help in the detection students' alternative ideas, the elicitation of hypotheses/predictions, provision of feedback and students' metacognition.