Paulo Mauricio

Co-author: Paulo S. Bretones We present the major findings of the work developed until now towards a fine-grain content analysis of Master and Doctoral thesis in Astronomy Education published in Portugal. The categories were the same used by one of us in previous state-of-the-art research, that is: year of publication, institution, school grade level, focus of the study and type of academic research. To this phase, we identified a total of 110 thesis produced between 1999 and 2018. While 58 are available online and thus allowing easy access and study, 52 are not. This implied an effort to reach to those in order to scan the content and perform the analysis. To this stage, we have 15 paper copies that we intend to digitalize with a remaining figure of 37 thesis, mainly, in the Porto’s Faculty of Science Library. Even with these limitations, we could identify two peaks of academic production in this area. The first in 2001 can be associated as the outcome of the first post-graduation in Astronomy established at Porto University (from where 68% of the thesis were developed), and the second in 2012 which would certainly be related to the International Year of Astronomy in 2009. Also, because astronomy is in the curriculum explicitly at the 7th grade, a significative amount of work is related to the production of materials in order to help teachers at this level. Additionally, if the initial thesis were addressed to high school and university education, later, essentially after 2010, a concern with Astronomy education at early years of schooling begin to increase in the overall production.