Abstract
There is no doubt that science -and, therefore, science education- is central to the lives of all (NGSS, 2013). This manuscript focuses on ideas in astronomy that are at the foundation of elementary students' understanding of the discipline: the apparent motion of the sun explaining the day / night cycle on Earth. According to prior research demonstrating that neither children nor adults hold a scientific understanding of the big ideas of astronomy (NRC, 1996), understanding of concepts may base students' progress towards more advanced understanding in the domain of astronomy. We have analyzed the logic of the domain and synthesized prior research assessing children's spatial representation from an earth- and a space based perspective to develop a set of learning trajectories that describe how students' initial ideas about apparent celestial motion as they take school science can be build upon. In this study elementary students' representations were compared by their resident context including urban and rural. This study may present a first look at the use of a learning progression framework in analyzing the structure of astronomy education. We discuss how this work may eventually lead towards the development and empirical testing of how children learn to describe and explain apparent patterns of celestial motion.
