| Abstract | Each year, approximately 250,000 students take a college-level introductory
astronomy course in the United States. Since this is the last time many of
these students will ever take a science course and since they represent many
of the nation's future politicians, journalists, and teachers, the burgeoning
field of astronomy education research has focused much of its efforts on
improving the learning and instruction in these courses. Thanks to this
research, we now possess better ideas of the topics with which students
struggle,why those topics are difficult, and research-based interventions to
help students overcome those difficulties. Yet significant gaps in our
knowledge remain. One such gap is cosmology, despite the fact that it is one
of the most commonly taught topics taught in introductory astronomy.
Recently, a collaboration of researchers from the University of Colorado at
Boulder and the University of Arizona has undertaken one of the first
systematic studies of introductory astronomy students' difficulties with
cosmology. In this talk, I will present some of our key findings and discuss
the effectiveness of a new suite of lecture-tutorials we designed to improve
students' learning of cosmology.
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