Calculating Planetary Temperatures from Radiation, Albedo, and Greenhouse Effect in a Descriptive Astronomy or Conceptual Physics Laboratory

Providing exposure to the process and methods of science is a fundamental goal of any general education college science course. This is largely because most students taking such courses are generally not science majors, so they are likely to take few, if any, other science courses. Meeting this goal can be a challenge in courses such as descriptive astronomy or conceptual physics that often have lower level, if any, mathematical prerequisites. Such courses, however, usually still do have a laboratory component, since completion of a laboratory science course is normally a general education requirement for graduation. The difficulty lies largely in the fact that actual science experiments, those that truly employ the scientific method, usually involve quantitative components such as taking numerical data and/or making calculations. Students with limited mathematical skills or backgrounds often find this very difficult. Many are easily overwhelmed by and get lost in calculations that, to them, seem to be a purely mathematical procedure that they will often resort to simply following by rote. As a result, they can lose any physical sense or meaning of what the experiment is meant to teach them and end up learning very little or nothing.