Misconceptions About Moon Phases

There's an interesting article in the November 2003 issue of The Science Teacher (vol 70, no 8) about students' misconceptions regarding phases of the Moon. Studies have shown that only about 25-35% of students correctly answer questions about Moon phases at the middle school and high school level (Sadler, 1987; Baxter, 1989). These misconceptions seem to persist through college:

Targus (1987) conducted...research with college students and found that 65% had no knowledge and 23% had fragmentary knowledge of the phases of the Moon.

The authors of the Science Teacher article describe a lesson plan for addressing these misconceptions, which I think would work very well with the Gizmo Moon Phases. I was also excited to see the authors use a pre-test/post-test 'action research' approach to see how successful their lesson plan was — if anyone uses Moon phases (or any other Gizmo for that matter) and collects data on its effectiveness, we'd love to hear about it!