Research in astronomy education has uncovered that many learners possess limited and fragmented understanding of stars. The corresponding misconceptions manifest in various areas such as star formation, size, the relationship between stars and planets, and their position in space and have been shown to persist across different age groups and educational settings, highlighting the need for further investigation. This paper presents the findings of an empirical study that examines secondary students’ views of stars and their evolution throughout their secondary school education. We designed and evaluated an instrument for assessing students’ views of stars in five domains (stars and the solar system, formation and evolution of stars, general properties and motion of stars, (sub-)stellar objects, as well as color and brightness). The instrument creation process involved several steps, including literature-based item development, an expert survey with faculty members, and a quantitative pilot study with a sample of $N=390$ secondary school and college students. This process led to a final version of the instrument that exhibits good psychometric properties. We used this new instrument in a cross-age study to investigate the alignment of secondary students’ ideas about stars with scientific views across different stages of secondary education. The sample of this main study comprised a total of $N=366$ learners, including 148 lower (aged 13–14 years), 151 middle (aged 15–16 years), and 67 upper (aged 17–18 years) secondary school students. Our study findings reveal a progressive development of students’ perspectives on star-related topics throughout their school education: Using analyses of variance and conducting pairwise post hoc comparisons, we observed a statistically significant increase in the proportion of responses aligning with scientific views across all aspects of stars examined in this study, as students progressed from lower secondary to upper secondary levels. We further report on widely held views of stars among our study participants that do not align with the scientific views and discuss the implications of our findings for both educational research and practice.

中文翻译：

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中学生明星观的跨年龄研究

天文学教育研究发现，许多学习者对星星的了解有限且碎片化。相应的误解体现在恒星形成、大小、恒星与行星之间的关系以及它们在太空中的位置等各个领域，并且已被证明在不同年龄组和教育环境中持续存在，这凸显了进一步调查的必要性。本文介绍了一项实证研究的结果，该研究调查了中学生对明星的看法及其在整个中学教育过程中的演变。我们设计并评估了一种工具，用于评估学生对五个领域（恒星和太阳系、恒星的形成和演化、恒星的一般属性和运动、（亚）恒星物体以及颜色和亮度）的恒星看法。 。工具创建过程涉及几个步骤，包括基于文献的项目开发、与教职员工的专家调查以及对样本的定量试点研究。$氮=390$中学生和大学生。这个过程导致了该工具的最终版本，表现出良好的心理测量特性。我们在一项跨年龄研究中使用这一新工具来调查中学教育不同阶段中学生对明星的看法与科学观点的一致性。本次主要研究的样本总共包括$氮=\mathrm{第366章}$学生，包括 148 名中学生（13-14 岁）、151 名中学生（15-16 岁）和 67 名高学生（17-18 岁）。我们的研究结果揭示了学生在整个学校教育过程中对明星相关话题的看法逐渐发展：通过方差分析和成对事后比较，我们观察到在各个方面与科学观点一致的回答比例在统计上显着增加随着学生从初中升到高中，本研究中考察的星级数。我们进一步报告了研究参与者中广泛持有的与科学观点不一致的明星观点，并讨论了我们的研究结果对教育研究和实践的影响。