Assessing Student Progress Along a Solar System Learning Progression
Abstract
"In our experience with middle school classrooms, astronomy is often taught as a set of shallow, disconnected facts. As a way of addressing this, the
Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS Lead States 2013) place an emphasis on big ideas to unify and organize student learning. One of these big ideas is solar system formation and how it can be used to explain observable patterns within the current solar system. This big idea uni es the disparate astronomical concepts often taught at the middle school level by providing a theory that can be used to explain how these astronomical concepts are connected."
