SLOPE - Studying learning opportunities in a planetarium environment

Despite planetariums long history, many questions remain unanswered about their role in educating various audiences to foster interest in astronomy. As visualizing the night sky is one of their main aims, planetarium displays provide a powerful tool to address misconceptions about crucial notions of space, astrophysical phenomena and the universe. This study investigates to what extent the unique planetarium setting supports high school pupils’ understanding of astronomical concepts.

The Brussels Planetarium offers a diverse educational program both for the public and for schools. In this project, we will focus on the Planetarium activities for pupils in the last two years of secondary education. These activities typically are part of a school trip to the Planetarium. This visit aims at enriching the traditional school based (geography) lessons, by exploiting the unique visualization possibilities in the dome to enhance student learning.  Whether these Planetarium visits are effective in terms of student learning, and which features of the visit in general and the visualization in particular may contribute to this effectiveness, is not clear, however.

In the proposed project, we will first investigate to what extent the unique Planetarium setting supports the learning of a selection of astronomical and astrophysical concepts by upper secondary school students. In a second phase, we will try to improve students’ learning processes and outcomes by enriching and optimizing the existing program and test its effectiveness. The ultimate goal is to design a research-based learning environment for astronomical and astrophysical concepts by fully exploiting the unique visualization possibilities of the Planetarium.

This PhD project builds on expertise from the staff of the Planetarium that will be combined with research expertise in astronomy/astrophysics, physics and geography education and educational psychology available in KU Leuven.