structor awareness of those strategies and
to help ensure their proper implementation,
researchers at the University of Arizona’s
Center for Astronomy Education
(CAE) have developed a teachingexcellence
workshop series with funding
from NASA and NSF. Over the past five
years, the workshops have been offered at
colleges and universities and at national
meetings of organizations such as the
American Astronomical Society and the
American Association of Physics Teachers.
The workshops have been attended by
more than 1000 college instructors from all
types of institutions.
To conduct its own national study, the
AER community needed a reliable assessment
instrument like the physicists’ FCI,
but one that covered a central topic of the
Astro 101 curriculum. To that end, Erin
Bardar and coworkers created the Light
and Spectroscopy Concept Inventory
(LSCI)—a collection of 26 multiple-choice
questions.11 Light is the central carrier of
information in astronomy, and a survey of
Astro 101 instructors has shown that they
consider the nature of light and the electromagnetic
spectrum to be the most important
topics in their courses.12 The topic
domains of the LSCI are
‣ The nature of the electromagnetic spectrum, including the
interrelationships of wavelength, frequency, energy, and
propagation speed.
‣ Interpretation of Doppler shift as an indication of motion.
‣ The correlation of peak wavelength and temperature of a
blackbody radiator.
‣ Relationships between luminosity, temperature, and surface
area of a blackbody radiator.
‣ The connection between spectral features and underlying
physical processes.
The LSCI questions, like those of the FCI, were phrased,
as much as possible, in ordinary language, and they include
“distracters” drawn from common misconceptions. The
questions are not easy, and they often require multiple reasoning
steps to answer correctly. Three such questions are
shown in figure 2. The entire LSCI can be seen at
http://aer.noao.edu/auth/LSCIspring2006.pdf.
But does it work?
To bring about a shift in how Astro 101 is taught similar to
that motivated by Hake’s study of introductory-physics
teaching, we conducted a national study in collaboration
with instructors who agreed to use the LSCI, to determine the
effectiveness of various teaching strategies in Astro 101
classes.13 Our 4000-student study covered 69 class sections at