Volume 7 Issue 1 The First Big Wave of Astronomy Education Research Dissertations and Some Directions for Future Research Efforts by Timothy F. Slater University of Wyoming Received: 10/18/07, Revised: 02/09/08, Posted: 03/17/08 The Astronomy Education Review, Issue 1, Volume 7, 2008 © 2008, Timothy Slater. Copyright assigned to the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc. Abstract The past several years have presented the astronomy education research community with a host of foundational research dissertations in the teaching and learning of astronomy. These PhD candidates have been studying the impact of instructional innovations on student learning and systematically validating astronomy learning assessment instruments, both of which are important foundational work for the astronomy education research community. These efforts provide substantial weight to an argument that astronomy education research is maturing into a substantial disciplinary research field with many rich questions to pursue in the future. 1. INTRODUCTION Systematic reviews of astronomy education research projects over the last three decades reveal that the questions of teaching and learning in the domain of astronomy have often captured the curiosity of science educators and astronomers (Bailey & Slater 2003). In fact, an invited article appearing as "Resource Letter AER-1," written by Bailey and Slater (2005) for the American Journal of Physics, describes 135 research articles directly related to a systematic analysis of astronomy teaching and learning; the total literature base on astronomy teaching strategies is, of course, at least 10 times larger. A total of 135 research articles is simultaneously an impressively large number for a disconnected community of researchers to have produced, and a small enough number that one can, with some time, wrap one’s head around and successfully understand the range and domain of ideas, methods, and results. In recent years, astronomy education scholars interested in keeping tabs on the growing literature in astronomy education across numerous journals have volunteered to create various online systems to help, including SABER (Bruning, Bailey, & Brissenden 2007) and ComPADRE (Deustua 2004). However, the premier vehicle for