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Weinstein, M. Werquin, P. Vienna: OECD. Citizen science is a way to contribute to a community. One of the best ways to introduce citizen science to students is to incorporate a geography lesson.
This may be using something like Google Earth, and showing students where they are, where the citizen science project managers are located, and zooming in to the ecosystem and communities participating. By giving students a sense of place and belonging in a community global or local they gain the desire to participate and to become a citizen of that community.
Stewardship is the natural upshot of participation in research projects. Students suddenly care about what they are observing, and the community for which they are observing, thus they develop the desire to care for the community.
Learn More: On the Scistarter home page e you can search for specific places in your community where you can participate in citizen science. This may be in a classroom, at a computer, at night, at home, in a car, on a walk, in a park. You can choose where in your community your class can best participate. Citizen science allows students to feel a sense of self-importance; they are recognized as valuable contributors to a larger goal or scientific effort.
With the advent of computers and technology scientists are no longer in a vacuum. They need the community as a whole to help them collect and analyze massive amounts of data. Evaluation of journal entries includes looking for keywords in the written text and assessing the overall student attitudes toward the program. These data suggest that participants feel proud that they contribute data to a real scientific project and of their learning during the program Figure 4 contains examples of text contributed by participants.
Program educators often talk with students before they begin their activities and students routinely share dragonfly encounters, how they are teaching their family and friends to identify area dragonflies, and new things they learned about dragonflies through independent investigation.
We administer a parent survey during the program and parents confirm what the students tell us: Participants speak enthusiastically about the program and dragonflies, and are excited by the things they learned average score of 4.
Ninety-five percent of Driven to Discover participants reported high enthusiasm for their program Garibay Group , suggesting that this approach to teaching science is one that students enjoy. Students who participate in BugFest confirm these observations. Most BugFest participants complete their program several months before the event, so they are coming back to their posters after significant time away. It is clear from observing students as they talk about their work with thousands of visitors that they remember what they learned, are proud of what they accomplished no matter how tedious preparing their posters may have been!
Students at BugFest quickly notice that they know far more about dragonflies than most of the visitors and that they have information about a popular insect that they can share with interested attendees. Visitors often make a point of telling us that they enjoyed learning from the children and are impressed with their knowledge. In fact, some of the children are so excited about sharing that they occasionally trap visitors in conversation and must be coaxed away to allow the hapless visitor to escape!
We have limited evidence that some Dragonfly Detectives participants continue their dragonfly investigations well beyond the end of their program. Several BugFest participants tell us about dragonfly experiences they have had since their program ended, including teaching people how to identify common local dragonflies, making dragonfly observations near their homes or schools, and even continuing to participate in the Dragonfly Pond Watch project.
One student went a step further and developed a Dragonfly Club for her homeschool group that meets at a neighborhood pond once a week during the warm months to observe dragonflies and ask and answer their own dragonfly questions.
Although we do not track the students beyond the end of the program to see how long they retain their knowledge and skills, we have some evidence that the program produces lasting results for some participants.
Although most students who participate in BugFest are ones who especially loved Dragonfly Detectives and are therefore most likely to retain what they learned, the youth can immediately identify the focal species when we informally quiz them and recall the results of their study. Most BugFest participants completed the program between one and five months prior to the event, so they are clearly able to retain the information for at least a few months.
One activity was a trivia game during which the children competed for prizes. The speed with which students recalled specific information, such as which characteristics to look for to identify a wandering glider or how to differentiate black saddlebags one of their focal species from Carolina saddlebags not a focal species but present in large numbers at almost all sites was impressive.
All attendees were able to answer enough questions to take home a prize, which provides anecdotal evidence that at least some participants retain what they learn for two to three years. One teacher whose students participated three years previously recently told us that her students are still talking about dragonflies, still helping their classmates identify the species on their school grounds, and using the equipment they took home.
It is heartening to hear anecdotes such as this, but it also suggests that the experience was sufficiently impactful to result in lasting effects. One of the goals of Dragonfly Detectives is to investigate how effective children are at collecting publication-quality data. Although citizen science is not a new form of scientific discovery, science in the past years has evolved into an exclusively professional enterprise Cooper As a result, amateur-generated data are often met with skepticism and distrust such that citizen scientist—generated data are scrutinized more heavily than scientist-generated data Bonney et al.
Proof of sound data must be offered for results to be taken seriously and considered valid. Although there is ample evidence that citizen science data are of about equal quality to that collected by professional scientists—so long as the project leader is realistic about who the citizen scientist audience will be, what tasks they can perform well, and the training required Kosmala et al.
Citizen science is increasingly used as an educational tool in K—12 settings, but the effectiveness of these programs remains understudied Ballard, Dixon, and Harris Even less well known is how effective children are at collecting data as citizen scientists.
Given the concern that many scientists have for data collected by adults, we investigated how well children collect data, especially given the complex tasks many citizen science projects require of them. To answer this question, we look at several measures of effectiveness. The dragonfly identification quizzes compare the identification scores of the participants on their first day immediately after learning how to identify the five focal species of dragonflies to their scores on the last day after spending several days in the field observing dragonflies in nature.
Because we ask students to collect data for two citizen science projects that depend on their accurately identifying specific dragonfly species, this skill is essential if they are to collect useable data. We do not submit data from the first day for the Dragonfly Pond Watch to ensure that only quality data are shared with the project leaders.
In contrast, students are nearly universally able to identify the common whitetail dragonfly from the first day, so the Dragonfly Detectives data are not hindered by ability to accurately identify the focal species for that project.
One potential issue we anticipated was that participants might not accurately count the dragonflies for Dragonfly Detectives. Because we ask them to stand still and silently count dragonflies for a block of time, however small, we worried that students would become distracted or start competing with each other to get the biggest counts, whether they were accurate or not.
The heavy emphasis we place on precision, or getting the same score as your neighbors, has helped keep the children focused with less urge to compete. This measure does not specifically address accuracy, however, as students can get the same count as their neighbors without accurately counting dragonflies.
Starting in year 2, we video-recorded the pond at one site as the participants counted dragonflies. The lead scientist counted the dragonflies captured on the videos and we compared her counts to those of students. On the first day, a small percentage of student counts approached the expert count, but by the last day most student counts were close or identical to expert counts Goforth and Peterman, Forthcoming. The data students gather the first and sometimes second field day is low-quality and cannot be used for publication, but by the third and fourth day, students collect data that we consider publication-quality.
These data become a part of the research submitted for publication. We have more data to incorporate into our analyses, and the accuracy data presented here is from only one site that has the most contact with the project leaders and scientist.
Other sites further removed from the project scientists could show different results, but we feel confident that our Dragonfly Detectives participants collect high-quality, useful data for at least some portion of their time in the program.
We believe that Dragonfly Detectives is an example of a citizen science program that effectively engages children in authentic science. He specializes in environmental law and has written extensively about the intersection of law, science and policy. Sierra Adler is a writer with a master's in science communication from the University of Otago in New Zealand. Her work focuses on public perception of science, the use of SciArt for science communication, and scientifically informed community-based decision-making practices.
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