Space scale: Models in the history of science and students' mental models

This paper deals with the problem of relating distance and scale by way of alternative models of perception taken from the history of science. The intuitive patterns of modern school children in evaluating the Solar System are then compared with those in the history of science. Immediate experience and intuition by children often contradict scientific understanding. The children in this study, for example, do not see the rays of the Sun as being parallel and ignore the curvature of the Earth. The authors argue that children's understanding of the rays of the Sun as not being parallel as well as their ignoring the curvature of the Earth is due to the limitation resulting from the students' 'actual activity zone', and not to their insufficient knowledge. This study makes specific suggestions to broaden the scientifically based 'actual activity zone' of students. We suggest that laboratory work based on historical experiments using elementary geometry - as, for example, the determination of the radius of the Earth by Eratosthenes - promotes a scientific understanding of astronomical measurements. © 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers.