Baseline Survey

As a first step towards improving astronomy education in schools, we at the OAE India Center are conducting a baseline survey to understand the current status of astronomy education in the country. The Baseline Survey is a 16-question instrument that investigates the students' perceptions of the existing astronomy content in the school curriculum, their basic astronomy knowledge, general interest level, access to astronomy resources, and connections of their cultural knowledge with astronomy. This survey is geared towards 14 - 15 year old students (class IX in India).

This survey is being conducted nationwide in 10 languages with over 2000 school students across a variety of settings (e.g. urban, rural, different school boards, and medium of instruction). The data from such a survey can yield useful insights that can help in developing improved astronomy curricula and effective teacher training programs in the future.

Introduction







Baseline Survey Questionnaire (Click here)


Baseline Survey Analysis tool (Click here)

If you are interested in conducting the survey or collaborating with us, please email us at oaeindia@iucaa.in to get access to all updated survey related documents (example consent forms, coding scheme etc).

Completed survey: city locations on map

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Collaborators - Moupiya Maji1,2, Surhud More1,2, Aniket Sule1,3, Akshat Singhal1,3, Pritesh Ranadive3, Kshitij Chavan1,2, Avik Dasgupta4, Masoom Jethwa4, Niruj Mohan Ramanujam5, Vikranth Pulamathi5, Vishaak K.B.5, Snehalata5, Punith R6, Amoghavarsha N6, Ajit Srivastava7, Subhendu Pattnaik8, Hum Chand9, Paryag Sharma9, Madhu Sudan9, Priya Hasan10, Meraj Madani10, Anindya De11, Jayant Ganguly12, Mumtaz Syed13, Virendra Yadav14, Kuntal Mishra14, Arjun Singh14, Pooja Joshi14, Mamta Gulati15, Twinkle Sharma15, Disha Sawant16, Syed Ishtiyaq17, Divya Oberoi18



1. International Astronomical Union Office of Astronomy for Education Center, India ; 2. Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pune ; 3. Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education-Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai ; 4. Vikram A Sarabhai Community Science Centre, Ahmedabad ; 5. Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bengaluru ; 6. Indian Institute of Astrophysics, COSMOS Mysuru, Bengaluru ; 7. Institute of Physics, Bhubaneswar ; 8. Pathani Samanta Planetarium, Bhubaneswar ; 9. Department of Physics and Astronomical Science, Central University of Himachal Pradesh, Dharamsala ; 10. Maulana Azad National Urdu University, Hyderabad, Hyderabad ; 11. Hindu School, Kolkata ; 12. Regional Sci center Kalikut, Kozhikode ; 13. S-Matrix Explorers, Mumbai ; 14. Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational-Sciences, Nainital ; 15. Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology, Patiala ; 16. Pune Knowledge Cluster, Pune ; 17. National Institute of Technology, Srinagar ; 18. National Centre for Radio Astrophysics of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Pune

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Textbook Analysis Tool

Astronomy is a subject of specialization, and yet, a number of day-to-day phenomena that intrigue children can be explained using basic sciences covered at the school level. This provides an opportunity to give them a glimpse of how science works and to introduce them to the scientific process. But this aspect of science at times remains unexplored with the classroom discourse being restricted to learning new facts and definitions. Textbooks are the primary resource, both for students and for teachers which determine the classroom discourse. This points to the need to review the astronomy content covered in the school textbook for their completeness.

We have developed a framework to evaluate both the textual and visual content related to astronomy covered in the school textbooks, and an easy to use Google Spreadsheet-based tool for it. The tool is appropriate for topics covered for the age group of 11 - 15, providing for easy evaluation and analysis of the results. This tool should help identify gaps in the existing curriculum and to identify interventions both at the classroom and policy level.



Introduction







Textbook Analysis Tool (Click here) (Use template)

If you are interested in using the textbook analysis tool or collaborating with us, please email us at oaeindia@iucaa.in for analysis related materials.



Collaborators - Asmita Redij2, Pritesh Ranadive2, Aniket Sule1,2

1. International Astronomical Union Office of Astronomy for Education Center, India ; 2. Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education-Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai

Disclaimer: Both the Baseline Survey and the Textbook Analysis projects are ongoing. We are currently analyzing the data and preparing the manuscripts. After the papers are peer-reviewed, we will upload the finalised version of our tools (if any change happens). This page was last updated on Sep 21, 2023.