IMPROVING ASTRONOMY EDUCATION IN THE UNITED STATES BY INVESTIGATING OTHER CULTURES MELHORANDO A EDUCAÇÃO EM ASTRONOMIA NOS ESTADOS UNIDOS PELA INVESTIGAÇÃO DE OUTRAS CULTURAS

Our efforts in the U.S. to improve Intro to Astronomy courses has been futile in spite of our tenacity over the past three-quarters of a century. The TOAST is the widely used standard to evaluate students’ gains in the Astronomy classrooms. A possible solution is to expand our horizons beyond our culture’s borders and presumptions in order to bring our shortcomings in Astronomy Education research to light. Investigating other countries would give us insight into their teaching, language, and cultural advantages and/or disadvantages of their own unique process of developing an understanding of Astronomy. The process of translation itself will help us comprehend how other cultures think differently about astronomical concepts we are looking to obtain useful data of how other cultures develop their society’s understanding of particular Astronomy aspects where we may fall short. In efforts to achieve this, we took several bilingual speakers and asked them to document their thoughts as they translated the TOAST. We are still in the preliminary steps and are still searching for more participants in order to collect a comprehensible, well-defined, and logical translation in various languages that are culturally sensitive and linguistically accurate.