Enseñanza de la astronomía en el Bachillerato

Stars watching and looking for regularities in the sky, can be considered as one of the first scientific signs of the human being. Since then, astronomy and humanity have gone together from the past up to now. The study of this shared evolution offers a choice to the student to approach the way of working in science. Studying the difficulties of teaching beginners astronomy to high school students, must lead to improve the correct understanding of the basic and advanced astronomical concepts, of students and teachers. For this purpose we have started a research in which we ask ourselves the following questions: • What difficulties do students from high school come across when studying astronomy? • What does the actual way of teaching astronomy lack? We start with our hypothesis the following way: • The students do not understand the basic statements of astronomy because teaching it is done by using a lot of theory, nor revealing it as the astronomy has shown these propositions, and without taking into account the dimensions and times involved which by far exceed the human scale. To test the hypothesis an analysis of text books from the main publishing company, has been done of the subject Ciencias para el mundo contemporáneo of the first year of high school, rating a question sheet for teachers, for both actives and training teachers, and also rating a question sheet for students. The study of these text books can be concluded, that these don’t show the necessary characteristics to stimulate the correct learning of astronomy. Generally the text books, show a thorough knowledge, focusing on definitions on concepts without, taking into account as they reached, forgetting an essential part of astronomy as the observation. For analysis of the teaching profession through teacher questionnaires can be inferred that the teachers have an attitude similar to that of the textbooks to the teaching of astronomy. An analysis of the results obtained with the students sheets show how, due to the teaching received, presents deficiency in their understanding of astronomical concepts. Motivated by these results, we finally propose a possible development of the subject, with a new approach that provides the necessary changes to tackle the difficulty found at the teaching learning process of astronomy at this level.