Low-Tech Ancient Astronomy Labs That Teach About the Scientific Process:
Most "Astro 101" labs teach students about the particular methods used
that astronomers use to learn about the Universe, but fail to teach students
about the scientific process. In my non-science majors class on "The Solar
System and the History of Astronomy," the students undertake a set of labs
(listed below, with links) where they:
-build a knowledge base about the Solar System starting from scratch.
-peer review each other’s papers, learn about results by other investigators
through the literature,
and must make reference to each other’s papers to
follow through with a calculation.
-learn about inherent problems in "distance-ladder" type problems, where
one imprecise measurement affects the accuracy of
all the subsequent measurements.
Peer-Reviewing
There are three (or more) lab sections, and each section follows through
with different observations and measurements. The students’ reports are
turned into the instructor who, acting as editor of a journal, passes
the reports onto reviewers in other lab sections. The reviewers, who have
no prior knowledgeable about the experiment that was performed, are charged
with providing feedback about how to improve the report. The reviewers’
comments are passed back to the original authors, anonymously, and the
authors are to write a second draft. The best final report on any given
lab then is "published" in that week’s "class journal", which is disseminated
to all the students in the class. The authors who get published are awarded
bonus points in their lab grades. The quality and extent of the reviews
are graded as well, to ensure that all reviewers to their honest share
in this process. With this approach the students:
-attempt to communicate what they did to their peers,
rather than writing to the instructor.
-learn the hardway the difficulty of properly communicating
scientific results
-are judged in their writing by their peers, rather
than by the instructor.
-learn first hand about the communication process
that scientists use.
Building of Knowledge Base:
In these labs, the students essentially duplicate the accomplishments of
the ancient astronomers in that they obtain measurements of all types of
parameters regarding the Solar System without any prior knowledge of other
measurements. During the first week, one lab group determines the
size of the Earth (using a similar method as Eratosthenes). The results
of that lab are used by another lab group, which measures the distance
and size of the Moon (using a picture of a lunar eclipse and a method related
to that used by Hipparchus). The results of that lab are used by
a third lab group to estimate the distance of the Sun (using a similar
method as that used by Aristarchus). The distance of the Sun is used
to estimate the size of Venus' orbit (using a method used by Copernicus)
and to determine the distance of an outer planet (using parallax).
The students learn about how the community of investigators rely on each
others' results to build the body of knowledge, without any reference to
numbers listed in a textbook. Additionally, the students learn a
little bit about how the ancient astronomers made measurements of the Solar
System (without leaving the Earth).
List of Labs (with links to Word files)