The Daytime Moon

Beginning of article

The familiar adage "seeing is believing" implies that children will recall a particular phenomenon if they had the experience of seeing it with their own eyes. If this were true, then most children would believe that you could see the Moon in both daytime and at night. However, when children are asked, "Can you see the Moon in the daytime?" many will say "no," even though they have actually seen the Moon many times in the morning or afternoon sky. The formative assessment probe, "Objects in the Sky," (Figure 1) shows how persistent the belief is among elementary-age children that the Moon can only be seen in the nighttime (Keeley, Eberle, and Tugel 2007).

Learning Goals

Understanding where the Moon is located at different times of the day and its changing appearance as viewed from Earth are important goals for learning. In the early elementary grades, the Benchmarks for Science Literacy state that by the end of second grade, students should know that "the Sun can be seen only in the daytime, but the Moon can be seen sometimes at night and sometimes during the day. The Sun, Moon, and stars all appear to move slowly across the sky" (AAAS 2009). The newly released A Framework for K-12 Science Education (NRC 2011) states …