Recovering Faded Astronomy Understanding: A 3D Kinesthetic Model for Students Re-Encountering Years-Old Curriculum Content in Nepal

<p>AbstractGrade 10 students in two municipalities of Kathmandu Valley, Nepal, were repeatedly observed struggling to explain basic astronomical phenomena that the national curriculum places in Grade 6 and 7, several years before this study. Whether a brief physical demonstration can recover understanding that verbal instruction has left fragile several years later is not well established in the astronomy misconceptions literature, which has focused mainly on first-exposure learning rather than delayed re-teaching. This study addresses that question directly. We report a quasi-experimental, one-group pre-test/post-test evaluation of a 3D mechanical model of the Sun-Earth-Moon system, delivered as a 20-minute demonstration to all government secondary schools in Tarakeshwar and Nagarjuna municipalities (26 schools, 920 students, 511 female and 409 male, aged 15-17). Students completed a 10-item multiple-choice pre-test immediately before the demonstration and a parallel 10-item post-test, pitched at a higher cognitive level, after a break of 20 minutes to approximately four hours. Mean scores rose from 3.87 to 7.26 out of 10 (t(919) = -48.45, p &amp;lt; .001; Wilcoxon W = 2430.0, p &amp;lt; .001), with a large pooled-variance effect size (Cohen's d = 1.88, 95% CI [1.78, 1.99]; paired-samples dz = 1.60) and a normalized learning gain of 0.529 (Hake's ). Gains were consistent across the two municipalities (p = .935) but varied significantly between individual schools (F(25, 894) = 3.71, p &amp;lt; .001) and were slightly larger for female students than male students (p = .034). Item-level analysis identified one concept, the appearance of the New Moon, that resisted the intervention far more than the other nine, gaining only 105 additional correct responses against gains ranging from 145 to 523 elsewhere. We interpret the large effect size as a plausible consequence of the specific population tested, adolescents re-encountering content they had formally studied years earlier, rather than as an inflated or implausible result, and our working interpretation of the New Moon finding, not directly tested here, is that it may reflect an unresolved categorical confusion with lunar eclipses rather than simple forgetting. The absence of a control group and of delayed retention testing are acknowledged as the study's principal limitations, and a controlled, delayed-retention follow-up is proposed as the next step.Keywords: astronomy education; conceptual change; kinesthetic learning; misconceptions; science education; Nepal</p>