Chile is home to several of the world's biggest telescopes, but even though the Chilean population values astronomy as a national attribute, less than a third of them declare having some astronomical knowledge (Marinovic, 2016). In this regard, in the last years there was a significant growth in astronomy outreach and education programs in Chile, as well as an increase of astronomical topics in the National School Curriculum, but until recently there was no research on astronomy education at the Chilean context. Thus, the purpose of this talk is to discuss, for the first time with research evidence, the current state of astronomy school education in Chile. We present the results of assessing the astronomical knowledge of 169 K-12 teachers and 159 students (ages 15 to 17) using the Astronomy Diagnostic Test (ADT 2.0; Hufnagel, 2002), which shows a high presence of alternative conceptions in curricular topics that agree with those identified in several international studies (Bailey, 2011). We also present preliminary results from a study of teachers’ perceptions on astronomy education in Chile, analyzed with Grounded Theory, and discuss the effectiveness of astronomical courses and workshops offered to Chilean teachers and students.
