  We perform a situational diagnosis in topics of astronomy of pre-service
elementary teachers in order to try and develop didactic tools that better
collaborate with their formal education. In this work we present the instrument
we designed to put in evidence some of the most frequently used models on a few
basic astronomical notions endowed by them. We work with an open written
questionnaire comprising a limited but representative group of basic
astronomical notions. We discuss the results of two first pilot tests, provided
to 30 individuals, and we comment on the necessary changes applied to the
instrument in order to design the final questionnaire, which was then provided
to another group of 51 pre-service elementary teachers. A detailed qualitative
analysis of the answers revealed many well-known alternative conceptions, and
others that seem new. We find that prospective teachers have a hard time in
trying to explain the movements of the Moon and its phases. They also meet
difficulties to recognize and explain a couple of astronomical elements that
make part of our ordinary language, like the origin of a shooting star and the
real identity of the "lucero" (i.e., planet Venus). Amongst the answers offered
to explain the causes of the seasons, we found a singular causality, which we
think has not been sufficiently emphasized in the literature so far. Many of
the inquired people did not advance an explicative model -a cause: say, the
tilt of the Earth's axis- to justify a particular phenomenon -the effect: the
seasons on the Earth-, but rather made use of another phenomenon/effect, in the
present case related to the climate, in order to explain the seasons. However,
as we know, this phenomenon/effect (the climate) has a strong astronomical
component. We present here the full results of the first two tests and of the
final instrument employed, and we draw some conclusions.
