Using a sociocultural approach in teaching astronomy concepts with children of primary school

This paper describes the use of a social collaborative learning approach to teach astronomical concepts. We used a repeated measure design to test the effectiveness of a teaching intervention aimed at improving basic concepts of Astronomy. Results show that children after the didactical experience were able to give a detailed explanation of the acquired knowledge. These results suggest that the approach adopted is fruitful and helps children to learn and understand scientific concepts, revisiting their pre-existing knowledge, often influenced by naïve explanations.