An adapted three-dimensional model of place attachment is proposed as a theoretical framework from which place-based citizen science experiences and outcomes might be empirically examined in depth.
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Julia ParrishYurong HeBenjamin Haywood
To advance justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion in science, we must first understand and improve the dominant-culture frameworks that impede progress and, second, we must intentionally create more equitable models. The present authors call ourselves the ICBOs and Allies Workgroup (ICBOs stands for independent community-based organizations), and we represent communities historically excluded from the sciences. Together with institutional allies and advisors, we began our research because we wanted our voices to be heard, and we hoped to bring a different perspective to doing science with
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María Cecilia Alvarez RicaldeJuan Flores ValadezCatherine CrumJohn AnnoniRick BonneyMateo Luna CastelliMarilú López FrettsBrigid LuceyKaren PurcellJ. Marcelo BontaPatricia CampbellMakeda CheatomBerenice RodriguezYao Augustine FoliJosé GonzálezJosé Miguel Hernández HurtadoSister Sharon HoraceKaren KitchenPepe Marcos-IgaTanya SchuhPhyllis Edwards TurnerBobby WilsonFanny Villarreal
This project will draft a framework to guide citizen science projects in addressing issues of equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI). Citizen science, sometimes called community science, involves volunteers who use science research procedures to collect valid scientific data for research projects and who often learn much about science in the process. These projects contribute directly to scientific research and often collect data of direct relevance to many communities. Although there are millions of citizen science volunteers, only a small proportion come from marginalized communities. The project will host a series of six, half-day virtual (online) workshops with scholars and practitioners with deep understanding of the participatory sciences and issues related to EDI. Workshop participants will discuss topics relevant to preparing a framework to provide guidance for integrating support EDI practices in citizen science. The project will disseminate the framework and workshop recommendations through publications for researchers and practitioners, a new website that will serve as a hub for relevant resources and EDI professional development, blogposts, and webinars.
This project will focus on EDI issues in institution-led, large-scale, citizen science projects. The project will organize workshops addressing issues relating to: (1) designing multipurpose projects that can be useful for empowering communities with data addressing community needs, providing researchers a large and robust data set, and providing learners with opportunities to develop a deeper understanding of research; (2) developing diverse leadership and engaging marginalized communities in framing research priorities; and (3) supporting strategies across citizen science projects to address barriers to participation, identity professional development needs, and create inclusive models that foster trust, create supportive networks, and build capacity for EDI in citizen science. The workshop will include approximately 20 participants, including researchers, project leaders and practitioners, with a majority of workshop participants belonging to groups underrepresented in science, such as Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous people.
This workshop is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments. This includes providing multiple pathways for broadening access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences, advancing innovative research on and assessment of STEM learning in informal environments, and developing understandings of deeper learning by participants. The project will conduct a two-day workshop that will gather citizen science project leaders to address barriers in citizen science research and infrastructure: The inability to holistically study the movement, engagement, persistence and learning outcomes among volunteers engaged in multiple projects. The past few years have been a time of tremendous growth in awareness of and interest in citizen science projects. The project will address an increasing gap preventing projects in three now-popular categories (apps, projects hosted on government websites, and event-based projects) from adopting the digital tools created and available through SciStarter.com. The workshop will bring citizen science project leaders together to deepen an understanding of their needs regarding the adoption of digital tools, developed by Scistarter, which will result in more comprehensive data in support of research in informal science learning outcomes of volunteers engaged in citizen science across projects and platforms. The in-person and online contributions from participants will guide the development of resources and tutorials to scale adoption.
SciStarter is a repository of hundreds of citizen science projects. Through previous NSF support, SciStarter developed digital affiliate tools which project leaders use on their own websites to enable analytics (statistics gathered from user activity online) to help projects more easily recruit and coordinator volunteers, help volunteers track their contributions across projects and platforms, and help researchers holistically study the movement and learning outcomes across projects and platforms. The proposed workshop will facilitate iteration and adoption of the tools among three classes of projects, not originally accounted for, which have dramatically increased in numbers during the past year: 1) app-based projects, 2) projects hosted on government websites, and 3) event-based projects.. By co-designing and implementing iterative versions of the tools among these projects, the project will address important gaps in research, enable a richer, more comprehensive understanding of volunteer engagement patterns, and discover opportunities to build a stronger community of citizen science practitioners who collaborate to enhance volunteer learning communities. The project will culminate in improved research in this field and improved management of citizen science projects for appropriate recruitment and retention that fosters STEM learning.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
As part of its overall strategy to enhance learning in informal environments, the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments. This includes providing multiple pathways for broadening access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences, advancing innovative research on and assessment of STEM learning in informal environments, and developing understandings of deeper learning by participants. This travel grant focuses on broadening participation in STEM learning and advancing scholarship and practice related to Public Participation in STEM Research (PPSR). In PPSR, members of the public participate voluntarily in scientific processes, addressing real-world problems in ways that may include formulating research questions, conducting scientific experiments, collecting and analyzing data, interpreting results, making new discoveries, developing technologies and applications, and solving complex problems. Currently, participation in many PPSR projects does not often reflect the full range diversity in the nation. The Citizen Science Association (CSA), an organization that seeks to support the rigorous and ethical practice of citizen science--a form of PPSR--across a broad range of issues and communities, brings together PPSR practioners and scholars biennially. The CSA conference, to be held March 13-17, 2019, in Raleigh, North Carolina, will build networks and capacities to support scholarship and practice across the full range of citizen science and across diverse populations.
This travel grant supports 75 participants, 25 local and 50 national, from groups underrepresented in STEM, who are actively engaged in community-based environmental science and have not previously attended a CSA conference. Community-based environmental science projects, which often occur in minority communities, are increasingly relying on PPSR approaches, including engaging public participants in STEM learning through technology and the development of data literacies. Through this travel grant, the 2019 CSA conference will bring together the expertise and experiences of practioners and scholars from citizen science and community-based environmental science projects. The conference will facilitate four days of interactions and mutual learning with significant time for iterative reflection and active discussion to make the sessions personally relevant and meaningful. This intentionally allows for identifying areas of both commonalities and tensions across citizen science and community-based environmental science projects, with time to work through various approaches and issues with colleagues for greater learning. The interactions should allow for meaningful discussion of goals, theory, methods, recruitment and retention and other aspects of projects that make a difference in the success of projects. The structure of the conference includes panels, presentations, poster sessions, and discussion to increase the quality and extent of PPSR and community-based environmental science practice.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
Please join us in celebrating Citizen Science Day, which falls this year on Saturday, April 14th. This issue of Connected Science Learning is dedicated to highlighting effective citizen science programs that involve classroom students in collecting data for research scientists, while also engaging them in key STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) content and practices. Students get a “front row seat” to what scientists do and how scientists work, plus develop the reasoning skills and practices used by scientists.
With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), SciStarter 2.0 was launched to enhance, diversify, and validate participant engagement in scientific research in need of the public’s help. SciStarter’s leadership is part of the National Academy of Sciences’ Committee, Designing Citizen Science to Support Science Learning, which is developing guidelines and a research agenda for citizen science in education. This article briefly introduces educators to SciStarter 2.0.
In this article, The North American Association for Environmental Education (NAAEE) shares the programs and publications it developed to advance E-STEM—the integration of environmental education into STEM.
As part of its overall strategy to enhance learning in informal environments, the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program funds innovative research, approaches and resources for use in a variety of settings.The project plans to develop evidence-based principles to guide citizen science project owners in the coordinated management of project participants within the SciStarter landscape. SciStarter is a repository of over 1,500 citizen science (CS) projects. Through prior research, SciStarter 2.0 tools were developed which can be used to study and coordinate recruitment and retention strategies across projects. Coordinated management has the potential to deepen volunteer learning and growth and benefit project goals because it can address across-project skew (CS volunteers involved in multiple projects), evolving motivations, seasonal gaps, untapped synergies across projects, and other unanticipated factors that cannot be addressed via management within project silos. The project will increase the capacity of citizen science projects to achieve their myriad scientific, learning and conservation goals through enhanced coordination of volunteer management, facilitated by evidence-based guidance from the SciStarter's User's Manual for Project Owners. The findings of the research will guide project design and implementation towards synergies that increase the capacity of projects to generate scientific, learning, and conservation outcomes. Research about citizen scientists has focused on within-project assessments and comparisons of projects, but few have examined dynamics of recruitment, retention, and movement of individuals across projects. SciStarter is designed for embedded tracking of participation dynamics in a landscape of projects. The project will expand embedded assessment to measure scientific, learning, and conservation outcomes and their links to participation dynamics within and across projects. Through social network analysis, the project will describe patterns of bridges, ties, and distances among projects based on the cross-over of participants. The project will also propose qualitative research to understand project managers' perceptions of SciStarter and the costs and benefits of coordinated management of citizen scientists. The research is designed to provide insights into participation dynamics that will lead to subsequent knowledge building across citizen science projects, and determine whether new evidence about advantages and disadvantages of coordinated management will persuade project owners to rely less on the silo approach to volunteer management.
CoCoRaHS (The Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network) is a citizen science program where thousands of volunteers across the entire country measure and report the amount of precipitation that falls each day in their own neighborhood (see http:www.cocorahs.org). In the next three years CoCoRaHS will use strategies from the "Citizen Science Toolkit" and align activities to the "Essential Principles to Climate Science" to engage thousands more participants in collecting, reporting and exploring precipitation. Evapotranspiration measurements will be added to better teach and demonstrate the hydrologic cycle in action. Through strong NOAA partnerships with the National Weather Service, the National Climatic Data Center, the Earth Systems Research Lab and the National Operational Hydrologic Remote Sensing Center, precipitation data quality and accessibility for professional users will be enhanced. The CoCoRaHS network will be constructing training, data entry and visualization tools utilizing Web 2.0 concepts, cyberlearning tools and hand-held device applications with a goal of increasing participation and expanding the current volunteer network into broader, younger, more diverse and more interactive audiences.
Recharge the Rain moves sixth through twelfth grade teachers, students and the public through a continuum from awareness, to knowledge gain, to conceptual understanding, to action; building community resiliency to hazards associated with increased temperatures, drought and flooding in Arizona. Watershed Management Group with Arizona Project WET will utilize NOAA assets and experts from the National Weather Service and Climate Assessment for the Southwest (CLIMAS) to inform citizens and galvanize their commitment to building a community, resilient to the effects of a warming climate. Project activities will be informed by Pima County’s hazard mitigation plan and planning tools related to preparing for and responding to flooding and extreme heat. Starting January 2017, this four-year project will 1) develop curriculum with Tucson-area teachers that incorporates systems-thinking and increases understanding of earth systems, weather and climate, and the engineering design of rainwater harvesting systems 2) immerse students in a curricular unit that results in the implementation of 8 teacher/student-led schoolyard water harvesting projects, 3) train community docents in water harvesting practices and citizen-science data collection, 4) involve Tucson community members in water harvesting principles through project implementation workshops, special events, and tours, and 5) expand program to incorporate curriculum use in Phoenix-area teachers’ classrooms and 6) finalize a replicable model for other communities facing similar threats. Environmental and community resiliency depends upon an informed society to make the best social, economic, and environmental decisions. This idea is not only at the core of NOAA’s mission, but is echoed in the programs provided by Watershed Management Group and Arizona Project WET.
With the rapid development of technologies for exposure monitoring and data analysis, opportunities for utilizing citizen science and community-engaged research approaches in advancing environmental health research are ever increasing. On December 8-9, 2016, the Research Triangle Environmental Health Collaborative (Collaborative) held its 9th Summit, Community Engaged Research and Citizen Science Summit: Advancing Environmental Public Health to Meet the Needs of Our Communities in Research Triangle Park, NC. The timing of this particular Summit was fortuitous as it dovetailed with the
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Research Triangle Environmental Health CollaborativeMadelyn HuangKimberly Thigpen Tart