The Adler Planetarium, Johns Hopkins University, and Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville are investigating the potential of online citizen science projects to broaden the pool of volunteers who participate in analysis and investigation of digital data and to deepen volunteers' engagement in scientific inquiry. The Investigating Audience Engagement with Citizen Science project is administering surveys and conducting case studies to identify factors that lead volunteers to engage in the astronomy-focused Galaxy Zoo project and its Zooniverse extensions. The project is (1) identifying volunteers' motivations for joining and staying involved, (2) determining factors that influence volunteers' movement from lower to higher levels of involvement, and (3) designing features that influence volunteer involvement. The project's research findings will help informal science educators and scientists refine existing citizen science programs and develop new ones that maximize volunteer engagement, improve the user experience, and build a more scientifically literate public.
Through this review of research on public engagement with science, Feinstein, Allen, and Jenkins advocate supporting students as “competent outsiders”—untrained in formal sciences, yet using science in ways relevant to their lives. Both formal and informal settings can be well suited for work in which students translate scientific content and practices into meaningful actions.
This Advancing Informal Science Learning Pathways project, Using Technology to Research After Class (UTRAC), explores whether a combination of technology (e.g., iPad-enabled sensors, web-based inquiry-focused portal) and facilitated visits improves learning outcomes for rural and Native American elementary-age youth in after school programs. Expected outcomes include improved engagement, knowledge, skills, and attitudes toward science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). Project goals include promoting STEM learning through science inquiry activities keyed to specific Next Generation Science Standards as well as improving how technology can be used to enhance learning outcomes in afterschool programs. The experimental design of this project - testing the effects of physical or virtual facilitation visits on learning outcomes - will lead to improvements in STEM learning outcomes among rural and underrepresented students. This project will employ several innovations in utilizing technology to teach STEM topics including: (i) hands-on, real-time, crowd sourced data collected by participants in their schoolyards; (ii) a pedagogic emphasis on communication of schoolyard data among and between participants; (iii) testing of motivational incentives; and (iv) partnerships between after school providers, preservice teachers, and university researchers as facilitators. The entire process will be modularized so that it can be modified in terms of place, STEM topic or student cohort. The topic focus of the project -- Life Under Snow -- is relevant to participating students, as Montana school playgrounds lie blanketed under snow for the majority of the school year; it includes elements of snow science, carbon cycle science, and a combination at the intersection of three recent literacy initiatives (e.g., Earth Science, Climate, or Energy). UTRAC will pilot and evaluate facilitated snow science/carbon cycle science activities that couple real-time schoolyard data with tools patterned after those available through WISE (Web-based Inquiry Science Environment; wise.berkeley.edu). Participants will collect and compare data with other youth participants, and researchers will use formative assessments to define interventions with potential to maximize student engagement and learning improvements among underserved youth. The project will advance understanding of informal education's potential to improve STEM engagement, knowledge, skills and attitudes by quantifying how - and to what extent - youth engage with emerging technologies iPad-enabled sensors, and crowdsourcing and visualization tools. The deliverables include a quantifying metric for learning outcomes, a training model for the iPad sensors and web application, an orientation kit, a social media portal, and database for the measurements.
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.
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.
NOVA Labs (www.pbs.org/nova/labs) is a web-based platform designed for use by educators, students, and teens to engage learners with authentic data, processes, and tools of working scientists. The present evaluation study sought to investigate the outcomes achieved by users of the third NOVA Labs platform developed: Cloud Lab. The intended outcomes identified for student users were that they would: • Be able to successfully work with the real data provided in the Cloud Lab; • Demonstrate ability to interpret and use scientific data and tools; • Engage with real scientific data through the
This poster was presented at the 2014 AISL PI Meeting in Washington, DC. It describes a project that will expand the functions and applications of FieldScope, a web-based science information portal currently supported by the National Geographic Society (NGS). The goal is to create a single, powerful infrastructure for Public Participation in Science Research (PPSR) projects that any organization can use to create their own project and support their own community of participants.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
National Geographic SocietyMary Ford
This poster was presented at the 2014 AISL PI Meeting in Washington, DC. It describes a citizen science project that developed a question-driven online bird identification tool called "Merlin".
This project will expand the functions and applications of FieldScope, a web-based science information portal currently supported by the National Geographic Society (NGS). The goal is to create a single, powerful infrastructure for Public Participation in Science Research (PPSR) projects that any organization can use to create their own project and support their own community of participants. FieldScope currently provides various tools and applications for use by its existing user base that includes the GLOBE project and the Chesapeake Bay monitoring system. The application enables users to contribute volunteered geographic data collection efforts and sharing information among both professional and amateur users. The project would develop and test an enhanced version of the existing FieldScope application. The project supports major programming development for a fully-functional web-based application that would significantly enhance the usability of the current application. Along with programming new features and capabilities, the project involves extensive evaluation of the new capabilities and involves three citizen-based organizations as testbeds.
The project will increase the capability of the existing system to handle large numbers of users and user groups and also increase the number and variety of tools available to any user; provide customization through the adaption of common APIs; and provide for expansion of computer space through use of virtual servers in a cloud computing environment thereby limiting the need for installed hardware. This approach would maximize storage and computing power by being able to call on resources when necessary and scaling back when demand decreases. The platform would include advanced visualization capabilities as part of a suite of analytic tools available to the user. Social networking applications would also be incorporated as a way of enabling communication among users of a particular site. The operation of the portal would be supported by the NGS and made available free of charge to any group of users applying for space. Nominal fees will be applied to large organizations requiring large computing space or additional features. User groups can request NGS supply custom features for the cost of development and deployment.
The evaluation of this project is extensive and focused on formative evaluation as a means to identify user preferences, from look and feel of the site to types of tools desired and types of uses expected. The formative evaluation would be conducted ahead of any commitment to programming and formatting of the features of the site. The project responds to a need expressed throughout the citizen science community for web-based applications that enable individuals to engage in a topic of interest, interact in various ways on such a site including the submission of data and information, analyze the information in concert with others and with working scientists in the field, and utilize state-of-the-art tools such as visualization as a way of making sense of the data being collected. There have been numerous proposals to create similar types of sites from various groups, each based on its own perceived needs and grounded in its own particular discipline or topic. This activity could serve this community more broadly and save similar groups the trouble and expense of creating sites from scratch.
Across the globe, citizen science projects are becoming increasingly poised to address social and environmental challenges and answer broad scientific questions. Although rapidly increasing in number, these projects need easy-to-use software tools for data management, analysis, and visualization to be successful. This project transforms how citizen science projects unfold locally, regionally, and globally by creating software that supports the full spectrum of project activities. It empowers projects to ask and answer their own local questions while contributing data critical to larger-scale issues. These tools will allow projects to announce training events; track volunteers; create datasheets; enter, review, analyze, and visualize data; publish reports; discover resources; integrate data; and ensure that data are contributed to repositories (e.g., DataONE, NEON, GBIF, HydroShare, and EOL). Tools will be made available to citizen science projects and will be delivered as reusable software elements for use in existing websites; as website features on CitSci.org; and as Application Programming Interface (API) services and mobile applications. The tools will expand the national reach, local appeal, computational abilities, visualization techniques, statistical analysis capabilities, and interoperability of the nations' cyber-infrastructure. Using participatory design and agile methods, the project will: (1) develop reusable software elements that citizen science organizations can embed into their own websites, (2) harden and expand the functionality and capabilities of CitSci.org through new website features, and (3) extend the APIs of CitSci.org and develop associated mobile applications to increase system and tool interoperability. The target user communities will include citizen science project coordinators. It will deliver customizable tools and services related to all project activities and engage projects across a wide array of disciplines. Project coordinators will be able to customize all tools developed to suit their specific project needs. Adoption and use of the tools developed will create a cyber-ready workforce capable of collecting, contributing, and applying high quality ecological, geophysical, social, and human health related observations to solve real-world problems. These broader impacts will help the citizen science community better understand effective models of public engagement to ensure more impactful application of citizen science to societal challenges.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Gregory NewmanStacy LynnMelinda Laituri