ABSTRACT
One of the major discoveries in cognitive psychology, cognitive development, and science education in the last half century has been the understanding that children before instruction and adults after instruction hold a wide variety of theory-like beliefs about the natural world that are not the same as the current scientifi c theories in those domains (see Carey, 1985; Driver, Guesne, & Tiberghien, 1985; Gopnik & Wellman, 1994; Wandersee, Mintzes, & Novak, 1994). In this chapter I analyze the extensive research that has been carried out on children and adults in the domain of observational astronomy and draw out some of the theoretical implications of this research. I focus on those aspects of observational astronomy where the phenomena have the potential to give rise to naïve theories (e.g., the shape of the earth, the day/night cycle, the seasons, and the phases of the moon).
