Gymnasieskolans bristande astronomiundervisning : hur lärares attityder påverkar undervisningen

This paper is based upon a questionnaire and interviews with Swedish secondary school teachers (student of ages from 16 to 18). The purpose of the paper was to get a picture of teacher’s attitudes to astronomy in the physics courses and how this affects their teaching. The questionnaire showed that astronomy is the least prioritized field in physics in secondary school. Teachers seem to generally consider astronomy as the least important field and they spend little time teaching it, many teachers even exclude astronomy completely from their classes. Why astronomy has so low priority seems to have several reasons. Some of the more common reasons are that the curriculums does not prioritize astronomy, that teachers usually does not have very good knowledge in astronomy, that astronomy is not considered useful for high school studies and that astronomy often is taught at the end of the courses and therefore sometimes needs to be cut from the course because of time restraints. When the underlying causes for astronomy’s low priority have been uncovered a couple suggestions for solutions to the problems are presented. The paper also analyzes some of the problems with the astronomy part in the physics curriculums. They are vaguely and inconsequently written and this can lead to great differences in astronomy education from different teachers