SPACE Project Research Report: the Earth in Space

The Science Processes and Concepts Exploration (SPACE) project research report on Earth in Space was conducted at two centres: at the University of Liverpool and King’s College, London and published in 1994 by Liverpool University Press. Each centre took responsibility for research in particular concepts and for producing the report of the work. 

In the case of Earth in Space, one of the later reports to be published, the research was conducted from King’s and the authors were Jonathan Osborne, Pam Wadsworth, Paul Black, and John Meadows.

The research took place between September 1990 and January 1991. By 1990 the first edition of the National Curriculum for England and Wales had been published which provided an externally devised list of ideas relating to understanding of area of interest, which was taken as defining the area of the research.

These ideas related to, for example: the apparent motion of the Sun across the sky; explaining day and night, day length and year length in terms of movement of the Earth round the Sun; describing the motion of the planets in the solar system, etc.

In addition to exploring the extent to which students might develop such ideas from their experiences, the research aimed to address questions about: How disparate are the ideas about the Earth in space held by many students? What development is observable in students across the primary age range? What is the effect of intervention on the development of students' ideas about the Earth in space?

In the first phase of the research activities were devised to provide opportunity to explore students' ideas about the Earth in space. Primary school teachers taking part in the project involved their students in these activities prior to the phase in which their students' ideas were elicited using a range of techniques including individual interviews by the researchers and answers to written questions. The elicitation gave a broad picture of the level of students' knowledge and understanding.

The report provides a large number of examples of students' ideas drawn from a representative sample of drawings, writings and comments during interviews and uses summary charts to show general trends and give an overview of the main aspects of students' thinking about the Earth in space.

The results showed that there was a lack of simple observational knowledge about the daily movement of the Sun, a weakness in infant children's knowledge of time, a limited familiarity with distance and scale and a mixture of models about the movement of the Earth and Sun.

Unlike some other aspects of science, such as electricity and light, such knowledge cannot be shown or developed through empirical investigations which are a feature of much physical science. Hence, the intervention used broad strategies which were available for teachers to use whenever they judged appropriate: sorting, discussion and modelling/making activities, using secondary sources, observations and drawings.