Conceptual change in astronomy: Models of the earth and of the day/night cycle in American-Indian children

The purpose of the present study was to examine the models of the earth and the day/night cycle formed by American-Indian children. Twenty-six Lakota/Dakota children in the first, third, and fifth grades were interviewed about the shape of the earth and the causes of the day/night cycle. The results indicated that the children used a small range of relatively well-defined models of the earth and the day/night cycle similar to those constructed by Euro-American children as well as by Indian, Greek and Samoan children investigated in previous studies. All these models are similar in that they agree with the presuppositions of a framework theory of physics that appear to constrain them. The Lakota/Dakota children, however showed a preference for a particular synthetic model of the earth, the hollow sphere, which comes closest to the description of the shape of the earth provided in Lakota mythology. In addition, the younger Lakota/Dakota children used some animistic-psychological explanations of the day/night cycle that were absent in our previous samples. We may therefore conclude that while the process of knowledge acquisition in astronomy follows a similar path in all children regardless of cultural variables, cultural cosmology influences both the specific models constructed as well as the modes of explanation provided for astronomical phenomena.