On Adopting Educational Materials: A Cautionary Tale
The astronomy education community has made many educational materials publically available through various outlets. Unfortunately, adoption of educational materials does not guarantee instructional change. The materials—being nothing more than words on paper—are static, inert representations of abstract concepts that come to life only through interpretation and use by instructors and students. Research has previously demonstrated how instructors adopt, interpret, change, modify, and use materials in ways unanticipated by their developers (Brown 2009). This study investigates how a professor and teaching assistants used Engaging in Astronomical Inquiry (Slater, Slater, & Lyons 2010) during a laboratory section of an introductory astronomy course for nonscience majors.