THE CANDIDATE TEACHERS' PERCEPTION ABOUT BASIC ASTRONOMY CONCEPTS

Abstract

Learners acquire various knowledge and concepts during to their education. The most important role to enhance their knowledge and concepts is teacher. Thus, in this process entail to be teachers have adequate knowledge about their profession. The aim of this study is to detect the understanding levels of candidate teachers studying in various departments about basic astronomy concepts. These basic astronomy concepts are located in preschools' to high schools' curriculums. As a result of this, the sample of the studywhich carried out phenomenographic method was composed of 12 candidate teachers studying at, early childhood education, elementary teacher education, science education and physics education departments in 2009-2010 academic years. The data of the study was collected by the semi-structured interview consisting of five open-ended questions and one drawing question for each concept and two open-ended questions for the relationship between these concepts. The interviews lasted approximately 45 minutes. The obtained data showed that the candidate teachers could not submit adequate explanations for the concepts (the earth, the sun, the moon, planet, star and satellite). They could answer questions of describing the concept properties such as 'whatis the Earth's shape?', but they couldn't answer questions of explaining the reasons that they have these properties like 'whythe Earth has this shape?' in the interviews. The results showed that candidate teachers have not enough information about the basic astronomy concepts.