A three years teaching astronomy experience across grades 6-8

In recent years, we designed and tested a longitudinal teaching sequence for middle school students (11-14 years old) in a class of the Cipro-Ascoli Institute in Milan (Italy). Our research aimed to promote students’ cognitive and metacognitive development about few physics and astronomy core ideas through a longitudinal three years long pathway. In this paper, we present the context’s characteristics, the methods used to design the teaching proposal, some examples of collected data about students’ knowledge development and a possible criterium to organize and analyse the huge amount of data. Our analysis reveals an emerging result: students’ growing mastery of scientific practices and increasing ability in performing scientific investigations. This perspective was inspired by key results of K-12 science education framework (National Research Council, 2012): core ideas; scientific practices; learning progressions.