PS 102 Astronomy Club

This is information for members of the PS102 Astronomy Club and their families. The intent of this section is the provide access to the club meeting materials and additional resources to help your children learn more about astronomy and develop a general interest in science.

For the 2008 spring session, I tried to put the lesson text directly on the web and found that a bit difficult, so I’m trying something a little different this time around. You can still find the 2008 spring lessons and handouts, but to reduce my own work load a bit, I’m simple going to publish the handouts as PDF files for the 2008 fall sessions. Both 4th and 5th grade sessions will be covering the same material for the 2008 fall, so there is only one set of hand-outs.

But first, a little “philosophical” background. In spite of what seems to come out of most elementary education books and tests, science is not content. Science is first and foremost a framework for understanding the natural world in which we live. Science majors, even at the college level, naturally have to learn a lot of content and in this club your children will (hopefully!) be learning a lot of astronomy content. But the real hope is not that they will come away with a lot of astronomy knowledge or that they will go into careers in astronomy, physics, or some other science. My real hope is that your children will start down the road of a scientific worldview that causes them to follow their curiosity, asking why is the world the way it is, how does that work, how do the pieces fit together. I hope they will learn to see the relationships of cause and effect in the natural world and learn to analyze effects looking for the causes. In the sciences, we refer to this as analytical thinking and contrast it (somewhat) to critical thinking.

Critical thinking has been defined in various ways^1,2,3, and stresses self-analysis of belief systems. I think of this as an attempt to formalize my mother’s advice: “don’t believe what you hear and only half of what you read.” While that advice may have been hyperbole, it points to the need to avoid credulity, something that all of our children need to learn as they grow from complete trust to a healthy skepticism.

Analytical thinking is a component of critical thinking (and by some definitions “merely” a component), but in developing a scientific worldview, this component is elevated to central role. Analytical thinking requires that one methodically break down problems into their constituent parts and examine cause and effect relationships. It involves learning to synthesize new hypotheses of behavior from the knowledge you have then subject those hypotheses to tests. [Insert comments from Mercury Magazine].⁴

Okay, the above was for you parents reading this. For you children in the club, Ms. Frizzle (of Magic Schoolbus fame) would put it this way: “Wahoo! Take chances, make mistakes, and get messy!” Just in case you’re wondering, “wahoo” means have fun.⁵

¹ Wikipedia, Critical Thinking, provides a good overview.

² Huitt, W. (1998). Critical thinking: An overview. Educational Psychology Interactive. Valdosta, GA: Valdosta State University.

³ CriticalThinking.org provides a definition so all-encompassing that it includes nearly all rational thought. As such, it is incorporated into scientific thinking, something with which their website agrees.

⁴ Mercury, vol 35, no. 1, p 11, What is it We Teach? Astronomical Society of the Pacific.

⁵ Okay, I made that up, but it works for me.