The effect of technology-enriched astronomy course on students' conceptual understanding, interests and attitudes

The aim of this study is to explore the effects of the lecturing with the technology-enriched lessons on level of understanding astronomy concepts and interest and attitudes towards astronomy of fourth grade students of science teaching in astronomy courses at the level of undergraduate. Activities enriched with technology involve mobile planetarium, stellarium, animations, videos, simulations, sky view free, sky map and space 4D mobile app and QR code work. As in all areas of education, it is believed that practiceoriented lecture in Astronomy teaching will affect the students' understanding of the concepts in the course. The concepts in the curriculum of Astronomy of the undergraduate program in Science Teaching usually consist of abstract concepts. It is thought that technology enriched activities will help to make abstract concepts more concrete in the course. The research consists of two stages. In the first stage, the effects of activities on students' conceptual understanding were investigated. In the second stage of the study, the effects of the activities on students' interest and attitudes towards astronomy were explored. In the first stage of the study, the holistic single situation pattern was used. Word association test and semantic analysis table were used as pre-test and post-test in order to determine the change in conceptual comprehension levels of students. In order to support the data, semi-structured interviews were conducted with the students at the end of the application. In the second stage of the study, one of the mixed research methods (embedded method), which include quantitative and qualitative research methods, are used. Interest scale for astronomy were used to determine the change of students' interest in astronomy in the quantitative part as a pre- test and Attitude scale for Astronomy were used to determine the change of studentsʼ attitudes in astronomy as a post-test. At the end of the application, semi-structured interviews were made with the students and the changes in interest and attitude were investigated deeply. As a result of the research, it can be said that the activities enriched with technology changed the students' comprehension of the concepts of Astronomy and their attitudes towards Astronomy positively.