The Effectiveness of the ThinkSpace Curriculum on Student Learning in Middle School Astronomy

ThinkSpace is a middle school astronomy curriculum for teaching seasons with activities that require students to make use of spatial strategies. The materials for the curriculum involve hands on models, visualizations, and computer simulations. Students are asked to use these tools to visualize different aspects of the Earth-Sun system and relate them to the cause of seasons. The aim of this research is to determine how effective the ThinkSpace curriculum is compared to a traditional seasons curriculum that does not focus on spatial thinking. This paper uses data from one school district in which the curriculum was implemented. The ThinkSpace curriculum was originally administered when the students were in sixth grade. In the district, about one fourth of the sixth graders used the ThinkSpace curriculum to learn seasons while the remaining sixth grade students used the traditional seasons curriculum. The students who used ThinkSpace in sixth grade were given a pre-test and a post-test immediately before and after ThinkSpace instruction, respectively. Two years later, when the students were in eighth grade, the district moved their astronomy requirement from sixth grade to eighth grade, so the same students had to take astronomy again. This time, the district mandated all students use the ThinkSpace curriculum. A pre-test was administered immediately prior to eighth-grade instruction. By comparing the eighth-grade pre-test scores of the students who used ThinkSpace in sixth grade to the eighth-grade pre-test scores of the students who did not ThinkSpace in sixth grade, we can measure the effectiveness of the ThinkSpace curriculum on long-term retention. Using a t-test we find that out of eight questions, the eighth-grade pre-test scores are 0: 76  : 13 (p <  0: 0001) higher for the students who used ThinkSpace in sixth grade compared to the students who did not use ThinkSpace in sixth grade. We also find an effect size of 0: 54   0: 01 when comparing the mean score on the eighth-grade pre-test of the sixth-grade ThinkSpace students to the sixth-grade non-ThinkSpace students. From these results we conclude that in the long-term, the ThinkSpace curriculum is more effective than a traditional seasons curriculum.