  Research in astronomy education has uncovered that many learners possess
limited and fragmented understanding of stars. The corresponding misconceptions
manifest in various areas such as star formation, size, the relationship
between stars and planets, and their position in space and have been shown to
persist across different age groups and educational settings, highlighting the
need for further investigation. This paper presents the findings of an
empirical study that examines secondary students' views of stars and their
evolution throughout their secondary school careers. Therefore, we designed and
evaluated an instrument for assessing students' views of stars in five domains.
The instrument creation process involved several steps, including
literature-based item development, an expert survey with faculty members, and a
quantitative pilot study with a sample of 390 secondary school and college
students. This process led to a final version of the instrument that exhibits
good psychometric properties. We used this new instrument in a cross-age study
to investigate the alignment of secondary students' ideas about stars with
scientific views across different stages of secondary education. The sample of
this main study comprised a total of 366 learners, from lower, middle and upper
secondary school. Our study findings reveal a progressive development of
students' perspectives on star-related topics throughout their school career:
We observed a statistically significant increase in the proportion of responses
aligning with scientific views across all aspects of stars examined in this
study, as students progressed from lower secondary to upper secondary levels.
We further report on widely held views of stars among our study participants
that oppose the scientific views, and discuss the implications of our findings
for both educational research and practice.
