  We report on ongoing work to gain insight into the astronomy knowledge and
perspectives of pre-service teachers and middle school students in Norway. We
carefully adapted and translated into Norwegian an existing instrument, the
Introductory Astronomy Questionnaire (IAQ); we administered this adapted IAQ to
(i) pre-service teachers at the largest teacher education institution in
Norway, and (ii) students drawn from eight middle schools in Oslo, in both
cases before and after astronomy instruction. Amongst our preliminary findings
- based on an analysis of both free-response writing and multiple-choice
responses - was that when prompted to provide responses to hypothetical
students, the pre-service teachers exhibited a marked drop in pedagogical
responses pre- to post-instruction, with corresponding shifts towards more
authoritative responses. We also identified potentially serious issues relating
to middle school students' conceptions of size and distances in the universe,
with significant stratification along gender lines.
