Eclipses

[asterroc]

Like any good researcher, when I noticed students responding a certain way to a free response question, I tried to tabulate what they all said, and turned it into multiple choice. Basically, the students were trying to describe why we don't have solar and lunar eclipses every month. The drawings below are based on the word descriptions from the students. And I wanna know what you think: which picture is the main reason why we don't have solar and lunar eclipses every month?

Descriptions in words:
A) "The Moon is in a different plane."
B) "The Moon's axis is tilted."
c) "The Moon goes above and below."
D) "The Moon's orbit isn't a perfect circle."
E) "The Moon's orbit is tilted."



[Poll #1956047]

Comments

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's an unusual paper because it's basically a lit review of one paper: taking Piaget's ideas which are usually looked at in the context of early childhood development and child psychology, and translating them into the language of high school science education. I'm not very familiar with Piaget's theory for exactly that reason: I've never seen it applied to older children, college age students, or adult learners, and while Karplus is applying it to older children, it's still really relevant to what I see in the classroom at the college level.

But yeah, I like it when something I read in science ed makes me go "whoah..." There's this image that education research is "easy", so it always makes me happy when I get the same sort of "ah hah!" moments that I get when solving a difficult astrophysics problem. If Ed were easy, then I'd never need ah-hah's because I'd never be at that stuck moment you get right before the ah-hah.