Bridging Science Education: Empowering Teachers Through Astronomy Training

Abstract

Abstract We present a short report on the Astronomy training activities targeting junior and high school science teachers in Banjar City and its neighboring districts. The training is aimed to introduce the use of Astronomy as a means of delivering and exercising science since Astronomy rarely fails to attract people’s interest. More than 30 teachers, comprising mostly science teachers in the area, joined our 3-day training program, which consists of short talks, hands-on experiments, as well as presentation and discussion. The program covers the following topics: Solar System, Motion of Celestial Bodies, Telescopes and Observation, Stars, and Galaxy-Cosmology; focusing mainly on pedagogical content knowledge using experience-based learning. By the end of the training, the participants considered Solar System and Stars as the topics with the most and the least impact/comprehension improvement for them, respectively. Nevertheless, there are only slight differences on the impact scale among the topics, all of which show a mean impact scale > 3.75 out of 5. Additionally, 75% of the participants stated the materials were helpful and beneficial for them as a teacher. This indicates that, according to the participants, the training in general was fruitful and increased their understanding on the topics delivered.