This media and research project will develop and study the use of new media, broadcast television, and social networks to introduce Citizen Science to a national audience, and motivate their direct involvement and participation. Project deliverables will include: four nationally-distributed public TV programs hosted by Waleed Abdalati, Director of CIREs at the University of Boulder and former NASA Chief Scientist; online videos for training and outreach of citizen science partners; digital engagement via social media; and a custom-designed application ('2nd screen app') that enables users to obtain additional informational content, share information, and connect with other viewers. The evaluation and research study will build new knowledge on how these deliverables can motivate the public to become citizen science participants. The investigators estimate the four television programs will reach approximately 80% of U.S. television households. In addition, videos and other content will be distributed through channels such as iTunes, Hulu, Netflix, and social media. Target audiences will include the general public, citizen science activists, and professional scientists. Underrepresented groups will be reached through special Google Hangouts, and professional societies such as SACNAS and AGU. The research components of the project will provide evidence on how traditional researchers respond to citizen science, and explore the deliverables' use as recruitment tools for citizen science projects and impacts on viewers' attitudes, behaviors, and skills related to citizen science. Data will be collected from multiple sources, including online surveys, in-person focus groups, and analyses of users' online postings. Retrospective surveys will be administered to explore changes in behavior regarding whether respondents have increased their interaction with professional scientists, or participated in citizen science initiatives. A quasi-experimental study will be conducted to assess the value added by the 2nd screen app.
Earth Partnership: Indigenous Arts and Sciences (EP) will develop and refine a model for integrating Indigenous and informal and formal K-20 educators in ecological restoration, project-based learning and professional development. EP will involve participants in Native habitat restoration on community spaces, school grounds and nearby natural areas as a context for intergenerational STEM learning across age, ecosystem, discipline, learning style, culture and place. EP integrates Native knowledge and core values including relationship, reciprocity, respect and responsibility with Western STEM concepts and processes. The project will integrate the expertise of university social, physical, life and learning scientists and community and tribal practitioners to design, develop and test informal STEM learning incorporating ecological restoration, citizen science and cultural diversity. EP grows out of a teacher professional development model funded by NSF and is a network that now includes participating individuals and organizations from many states. This network will enhance dissemination and provide a foundation for a larger project growing out of the results of this project. EP will build capacity of Native and non-Native informal educators and citizens to work together to generate engagement among young people and adults with ecological STEM learning and stewardship. The approach will integrate culturally authentic resources, inquiry and citizen science process skills (e.g., data collection, analysis, ecological restoration, water stewardship) in multiple learning settings. Stronger multicultural, intergenerational and community partnerships will be supported to restore aquatic and terrestrial habitats through community-based stewardship projects and Service Learning. Through EP, Native youth will be encouraged to explore STEM careers that will meet future workforce needs for managing tribal resources and become knowledgeable citizens able to use critical thinking and analysis of STEM-related issues in their communities. The project will use a developmental evaluation approach to assess project planning processes and outcomes of educational programs.
The Cyberlearning and Future Learning Technologies Program funds efforts that support envisioning the future of learning technologies and advancing what we know about how people learn in technology-rich environments. Development and Implementation (DIP) Projects build on proof-of-concept work that shows the possibilities of the proposed new type of learning technology, and PI teams build and refine a minimally-viable example of their proposed innovation that allows them to understand how such technology should be designed and used in the future and that allows them to answer questions about how people learn, how to foster or assess learning, and/or how to design for learning. This project team aims to explore how to foster learning in socially-networked communities, particularly learning that results in behavior change. Understanding how to foster such learning could have a wide variety of societal impacts, e.g., better fostering science, engineering, mathematical, or design thinking in school or college or on the job, fostering healthy behaviors, helping teens develop pro-social behaviors, and helping people learn to make environmentally-friendly choices as they live their lives. In previous work, this team has developed YardMap, an infrastructure for citizen science that brings together retired adults who are interested in planting and managing their yards in environmentally-friendly ways. YardMap enables social interactions and shared creation of virtual worlds in which participants can try out different ways of managing their yards and see what the downstream effects will be. They also track and display their changing practices and actual yards in ways that are visible to others. YardMap is used by many thousands of participants. In this project, the team is taking YardMap to the next level, using what is known about how people learn and come to change their behaviors to design and refine ways to more directly support individuals in critiquing and improving their behaviors and designs for the common good. What can be learned from the new YardMap will be useful in other fields that focus on helping people change their behaviors in productive ways. The PIs seek to explore how people learn and how to foster learning in socially-networked citizen science communities. Their research addresses how learning happens, how to foster learning, how to design to increase social activity, and how increased interaction with others elevates interest, generates knowledge, and leads to behavior change. Their technological innovation, an infrastructure for citizen science that fosters behavior change, builds on YardMap, an existing infrastructure for citizen science around environmental issues that allows collective data collection and analysis and supports interactive graphing and mapping. Participants design and refine ways of managing their yards in ways that take into account environmental concerns. YardMap enables social interaction and co-creation of a set of virtual worlds for trying out new ideas; learners who are part of the community interact with others in the community, create and refine virtual worlds together, interact with things in the virtual world, manipulate those worlds and collect and analyze data about outcomes, and discuss visual objects that represent real things and practices. As well, individuals track and display their changing practices and actual yards in ways that are visible to others. YardMap can be thought of as a maker movement community focused on yard maintenance; like other maker communities, it encourages participants to create, share and discuss new inventions and practices in a social-networked community setting. Using both what is known about learning in communities and what is known about social drivers of interaction, the team is is extending YardMap to focus on fostering learning and investigating the relationships between learning and behavior change and the influences each has on the other. Much will be learned about how to use social interactions in positive ways to help individuals become more comfortable with behaviors they need to or should take on for health, civic, or educational reasons. What is learned and the technological infrastructure that is created will be directly applicable to other situations where individual behavior changes are needed for change to happen in a social system (e.g., environmental action, changing the culture of an organization, changing norms in a community, perhaps even creating learning communities in formal on-line courses).
This project will research factors influencing the implementation of programs designed to increase diverse participation in informal science. The goal is to provide the informal science education field with information and tools that will help them design effective programs that more effectively engage a broad range of diverse audiences. The project has two major components. First, the project will research the implementation of a citizen science project, Celebrate Urban Birds (CUB), in major U.S. cities. Citizen science projects involve public volunteers in gathering scientifically valid data as part of ongoing research. Second, building on results of the research, the project will launch a website and learning community (called a Community of Practice or CoP) supporting informal science educators that are involved in designing and implementing informal science programs with an emphasis on engaging diverse participants. The project will be lead by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology (CLO), a leader in designing and researching citizen science projects, in collaboration with the Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC) and five science center members of ASTC, where the CUB program will be implemented and researched. The objective of the research is to better understand contextual factors and how they impact implementation even when accepted practices are followed. Such research is key not only to revealing accepted practices but also to understanding how projects are implemented in the face of concrete operational, cultural, economic, and demographic variables. The research will use a comparative case study approach, which is designed for studies requiring holistic, in-depth investigation. The development of the website and the CoP will be guided by a Network Improvement Strategy, a research-based approach to designing educational CoPs. The development of the CoP will involve the project stakeholders including the informal science organization practitioners, community organization representatives, CUB staff, ASTC staff, advisors and consultants. This strategy will allow the project team and pilot sites to leverage their diverse experiences and skill sets to improve practice; provide space for researchers and practitioners to work together as partners; and develop a nuanced set of strategies that can be implemented across a variety of organizational contexts.
The Citizen Science Embedded Assessment project will explore the use of embedded assessment to measure participant science inquiry skill development within the context of citizen science projects. Citizen science (CS) projects partner volunteers with scientists to participate directly in research endeavors. Embedded assessments (EAs) assess participant skills and performance that are directly integrated and are indistinguishable from day-to-day activities. As such, EAs allow learners to demonstrate their science competencies through tasks that are integrated seamlessly into the learning experience itself. The CS field has a growing inventory of self-assessment tools, however, the evaluation of citizen science (and other informal science projects) using such subjective assessments can be remarkably improved when these are used in combination with objective measures of knowledge, skills or other resources participants gain through their participation. Science skills, such as data collection and analysis, are particularly important for CS projects because of their focus on the scientific process and their need for rigorous data collection. Despite the focus on skill gains, CS projects rarely measure such improvements. Embedded assessments (EAs) offer a critical method for understanding the impacts of these participatory learning environments. The project will develop and field test EAs on citizen science topics with an environmental science focus. It will also design training to support their use by individual projects. The project has three primary research foci: (1) identifying common and unique science inquiry skills targeted by CS projects, and how skills are currently being measured to document project impact; (2) identifying the opportunities and challenges present in developing and administering EA tools customized for CS projects to assess science inquiry skills; and (3) assessing whether EA tools created for a CS project can provide project leaders with a better understanding of their project's impact on participant science inquiry skills. The project will address these questions with a needs assessment of research and evaluation studies within the CS community and case studies to develop and test EAs customized for three identified and interested CS projects.
This resource showcases a conference poster that the Wildlife Conservation Society presented at the 2014 Visitor Studies Association Conference and the 2014 Inclusive Museum Conference, outlining the work we undertook to explore the development of a proposed new family exhibit at the Bronx Zoo, "Safari Adventure," paired with selected results and takeaways. In 2011, the Institute of Museum and Library Services awarded WCS a grant to support our investigation and development. We asked ourselves the questions: How can zoo exhibits better connect people to nature? By what methods can we explore
This poster was presented at the 2014 AISL PI Meeting in Washington, DC. The Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow (CoCoRaHS) network is an existing backyard citizen science project that is enhancing the research efforts of scientists and promoting climate literacy among the public by engaging volunteers in precipitation-monitoring activities.
This poster was presented at the 2014 AISL PI Meeting in Washington, DC. It describes "EESIP", a collaborative research project between the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and UC Davis, aimed at Exploring Engagement and Science Identity through Participation in citizen science.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Cornell Lab of OrnithologyTina Phillips
This poster was presented at the 2014 AISL PI Meeting in Washington, DC. The Lost Ladybug Project (LLP) is a Cornell University citizen science project that connects science to education by using ladybugs to teach non-scientists concepts of biodiversity, invasive species, and conservation.
This poster was presented at the 2014 AISL PI Meeting in Washington, DC. It describes a project that creates citizen science projects in the Rio Grande de Manati watershed, taking participants through the participatory, collaborative, and co-creative phases of informal science education.
The Conservation Trust of Puerto Rico is creating citizen science projects in five research areas (insect monitoring; coastal/river system management; bird communities; bat assemblages; and cultural resources) that allow 140 Hispanic residents of Puerto Rico (age 14 and older) to move along a continuum of research involvement from contributor to collaborator to co-creator. As citizen scientists engage in scientific research that measures the effects of urban development on the Manati River watershed in northern Puerto Rico, the project team is evaluating the degree to which participants show changes in science knowledge, skills, attitudes, communication, and behavior. The proposed project is accelerating the development of citizen science activities in Puerto Rico. New scientific knowledge generated by citizen scientists will have practical importance within and beyond the Manati watershed because Puerto Rico is undergoing rapid urban development, resulting in the loss of biodiversity and emergence of environmental problems such as lower water quality. Environmental data collected by citizen scientists will form an environmental database that permits long-term watershed monitoring and informs land use decision making.
This paper focuses on an early stage of developing curricular materials to support students' learning of scientific inquiry. The materials being developed and tested, called Classroom FeederWatch (CFW), aimed to support science inquiry and were developed by a collaborative team of private curriculum developers and scientists (ornithologists). Inquiry dimensions were influenced at the outset by the newly released National Science Education Standards (National Research Council, Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1996) and by prior successful experiences of ornithologists with inquiry
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Deborah TrumbullRick BonneyNancy Grudens-Schuck