NSF Awards: 2009212
Citizen science (CS) involves individuals who are not professional scientists in scientific endeavors, typically in collaboration with or supervised by professional scientists or scientific institutions. There are hundreds of CS projects, many of which have the potential to engage elementary school students in collecting, analyzing, and making sense of data to answer authentic scientific questions. CS projects can also engage students with nature, inspire their curiosity and their interest in STEM, and support students’ connections between formal science education and authentic science experiences of data collection in the natural world. School-based CS can broaden participation in STEM by making science instruction more inquiry based and more activity oriented, both of which engage students who might not otherwise flourish in science. However, CS projects typically do not include substantial guidance or supports for teachers who want to implement the projects for instructional purposes, and this places a heavy burden on teachers who want to use them. The goal of our study, Teacher Learning for Citizen Science (TL4CS) is to generate knowledge about (1) the types of teacher learning that enable CS to fulfill its potential for student learning and engagement with nature, and (2) the types of supports that promote such teacher learning. The video will give an overview of the project and our work to date. This work has focused on developing teacher supports for two CS projects--the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, and Snow Network (or CoCoRaHS) and the Lost Ladybug project--and piloting them with teachers.
Patrick Smith
President
Thank you for visiting our TL4CS video! Our project is creating materials to support elementary teachers as they implement citizen science projects. Over the last year, our Teacher Advisory Group (five classroom teachers) has been piloting the materials in their classrooms. Next year, we’ll begin a randomized control trial to study how teachers implement these projects when they have access to our supports and when they don’t. Our team welcomes feedback and would like to pose the following questions to researchers, curriculum developers, and teachers:
Researchers: As we move into our randomized control trial, what issues would you recommend we be alert to?
Curriculum Developers: We’re asking teachers in the randomized control trial to complete a brief weekly log describing how they used the materials. We’re also interviewing a subset of teachers and observing their implementation throughout the year. The purpose of all this feedback is to inform revisions to our materials. What mechanisms have you used to elicit feedback from teachers using your materials and what aspects were you most interested in getting feedback on?
Teachers: What have been your successes and obstacles implementing citizen science projects with your students?
Sarah Carrier
Professor, Science Education
We are excited to share our experiences and to hear your responses to Patrick's questions. Our pilot Teacher Advisory Group teachers have helped us learn about their implementation of citizen science in their classrooms using our support materials. Their feedback has helped us revise these materials with goals to best support teachers to implement citizen science with their students as they negotiate the realities and challenges of daily science instruction and to provide students with rich experiences in outdoor science and engage in data collection and analyses. Thank you for watching our video!
Kwame Owusu-Daaku
Great project - particularly with tapping into the existing CoCoRAHS network! Was it difficult to get district and/or school level buy-in into the project?
Sarah Carrier
Professor, Science Education
Kwame, thank you for your note and viewing our presentation. We have tried to communicate with districts how this work aligns with existing grade level standards, and we are still working on district approvals. Our state has many! We appreciate your note.
Patrick Smith
President
Kwame, as Sarah points out, we are currently working our way through district approval processes. We've seen a lot of enthusiasm from teachers. The state in which we're working recently mandated over 100 hours of PD for elementary teachers on reading instruction over the next year. This mandate has led some districts to limit teachers' involvement in other initiatives. Thank you for your comment!
Stephen Uzzo
Chief Scientist
Your teacher recruitment story sounds all too familiar. Struggling to incentivize the project, provide adequate communications and support and recruit teachers who are still recovering from the chaos of COVID can be daunting, not to mention IRB requirements and parental consent. I applaud your efforts and this leads to my question about the goal for eliciting feedback on the question (I assume) prior to randomization. What kinds of responses have you goten to this prompt and how will you use it in an RCT? Thanks for sharing your ambitious and impactful work.
Patrick Smith
President
Thank you, Stephen. One of the issues most on our minds right now is preventing attrition once the RCT begins in August. We're staggering honorarium payments for this purpose, but we'd welcome any other suggestions.
Karen Woodruff
As one of your presenters stated in the video, the citizen science approach provides opportunties for "dream lessons" where students make connections across siloed subject areas. The elementary classroom is ideal for this work - thank you for sharing your project and for supporting elementary teachers with this excellent approach. I would like to direct elementary teachers to your work if you are able to share a link or resource. Thank you.
Patrick Smith
President
Karen, thank you very much for your comment. Our project website includes an overview of the materials, but the materials themselves require user credentials until we finish our study. That's an attempt to prevent contamination between our treatment and control conditions. Here's our website: http://www.horizon-research.com/tl4cs/
Clara Cogswell
Great video! citizen science is rising to the fore as a way to increase not only observations but community stakeholder engagement, programs that engage the community in science from a young age are imperative. Is the data currently being stored or shared on any particular platform?
Our organization supports data storage and sharing from both researchers and citizen scientists, though specifically for water science data. If you are ever looking for a place to store/share/publish rain gauge data, for example, some of our data infrastructure might be a good fit. If you think that might be of interest, feel free to check out our video and let us know!
Patrick Smith
President
Clara, thank you very for your interest in our project. We're developing our resources around two citizen science projects: CoCoRaHS and Lost Ladybug. All data are stored on these two platforms.
George Hein
Professor Emeritus
Thank you for sharing this imaginative program. At least where I live, there has been a surge of citizen science projects as people looked for ways to engage with community members during the Covid epidemic.
Do the teachers with whom you work encourage their students to participate with their own parents in the citizen science projects? Or does that only sometimes happen?
Patrick Smith
President
Hi George. Thank you for your question. We're primarily trying to support teachers integrating citizen science into their classroom instruction . Although that certainly doesn't preclude students participating with their families, it has not been our focus. We have heard some anecdotal reports of students searching for ladybugs at home, but nothing widespread.
Sarah Carrier
Professor, Science Education
George, thank you so much for viewing our presentation. I agree that CS projects are indeed blossoming. Right now our students are doing these CS activities in their schools, but we hope that they are sharing these stories with their parents and that these experiences offer family connections.
Kevin Cuff
Thank you for sharing your work, which is so important during a time when many teachers struggle to keep students of all ages highly engaged in science content learning endeavors. As the teacher in your video expressed, citizen (or community) science activities provide opportunities for "dream lessons" to occur. One question that comes to mind is: have you considered engaging in similar work that involves middle and high school teachers?
Christine Goforth
Head, Citizen Science
Thank you so much for taking the time to watch and respond to our video!
I think all of us would love to do similar work with middle and high school students, but we had to start somewhere and chose to focus on the elementary level initially. Note that middle schoolers were the focus of the Students Discover project in our state a few years ago and those resources are still available to teachers in those grades. I personally hope we will continue our work with older students once we have completed our study, but you never know what interesting new questions will come out of our current work that will take us in a new direction at the elementary level again!
Sarah Carrier
Professor, Science Education
Kevin, thanks so much for viewing our presentation and for your question. Our team's goals are to start rich science experiences early. Many of us have backgrounds in elementary science education and we believe that this is the time to launch students' interest and engagement in science. We believe this builds a base for future learning and we agree that this must continue in middle and high school. We appreciate your attention to this important work.
Emily Harris
Thanks for sharing your great work to create supports for elementary teachers to facilitate citizen science projects! In terms of getting feedback to inform revisions, we've had recent success having teachers create short flipgrid videos responding to weekly question prompts. This allows them to talk about how they implemented materials and we've gotten more this way than with written logs.
I'm curious about why you selected these two citizen science projects. What did you consider for both the projects as well as the elementary audience?
Christine Goforth
Head, Citizen Science
Emily, thank you for taking the time to view and respond to our video! I’m interested in checking out the flipgrid videos, so thank you for the suggestion as well.
My colleagues may add more, but we chose the projects we did largely because they neatly fit the curriculum standards for our target grade - curriculum correlations are so important for getting teacher buy in to any project of this sort. We additionally considered the longevity of projects (and their accessibility to a wide range of schools across geographic areas. Each of our two chosen projects has a very different approach to what they offer as resources, so there are interesting questions we can ask related to that as well, especially in the first year of our randomized trials where teachers implement either CoCoRaHS OR Lost Ladybug with the supports we’ve developed and the other project without. I’m excited to see the results!
Patrick Smith
President
Hi Emily. Chris nailed it. I would only add that in the piloting we've done so far, we have indeed seen important differences in how the two projects have played out, which we think will be important in offering guidance for others who want to support teachers in implementing citizen science.
Jessica Hunt
I love the iterative nature and design of your project! It was so great to hear that you have a teacher advisory group. I'm sure this brought forward a lot of positive spaces for collaboration and co-authorship of ideas. This speaks to the sustainability of the program. Great work!
Sarah Carrier
Professor, Science Education
Jessica, thank you so much for watching our video. Our TAG group has helped us revise our materials based on their experiences. They have been incredibly valuable and have made us better and better. They feel like part of our team and we appreciate their ideas. Many of them will be joining us this summer for training our teacher participants and they will share some of the strategies they've developed in their own classrooms over the past year. We appreciate your watching and sharing your ideas.
Janet Stramel
Thank you for sharing this! Citizen Science is critical; and the connections to other disciplines is awesome.
Meredith Hayes
Project Manager
Thank you for viewing our video and your comment, Janet! Working closely with teacher advisory group has been very informative in seeing how interdisciplinary connections may play out. It's also been interesting for us to consider how teaching assignments (i.e., self-contained versus specialized) may influence opportunities for making such connections. We look forward to learning even more during our larger study in the coming year.
Folashade Solomon
Associate Professor
From your research, what are the major challenges to using citizen science in the elementary classroom? What conditions support effective implementation of citizen science? Is there something pre-service teacher educators can do to support inquiry and citizen science?
Patrick Smith
President
Folashade, you've almost restated our research questions! Those are exactly the things we hope to learn, among others. Over the next two years, we'll be closely studying what happens as teachers use the materials we've developed, so stay tuned. We do have some strong suspicions based on work we've done leading up to this project. We are huge fans of citizen science, but, understandably, most citizen science projects are not designed explicitly for classroom implementation. We're betting that by creating project-specific materials for teachers, we can ease the burden associated with taking up these projects. We believe it's also critically important that teachers see the projects as a way to teach the standards they're responsible for. We've put a lot of emphasis on making those connections explicit in our materials. We think teachers need to see citizen science as a way to accomplish their instructional goals, not as an add on. A member of our PI team, Sarah Carrier, is a pre-service teacher educator, and I'm sure she has thoughts on your last question. Thanks for your interest!
Sarah Carrier
Professor, Science Education
Floashade, thank you for your great questions. When I was an elementary school teacher, I used the GLOBE project with my students. This was new in the project and included intensive training. In addition I was an experienced teacher at that point. I agree with you that preparing future teachers with strategies to include authentic data collection in their classroom with citizen science projects is important. As Patrick stated, without citizen science support materials for application to their work with children, it can be challenging, especially for novice teachers. We hope our project will provide guidance that will expand citizen science to more classrooms.
Folashade Solomon
Associate Professor
This is great. I see that you mentioned the GLOBE project. Are there particular projects that connect well to classroom experiences?
Sarah Carrier
Professor, Science Education
Folashade, thank you for your question. GLOBE collects weather data to inform research on climate change and the citizen science data around the globe has helped in monitoring data around the world. CoCoRaHS collects data on weather and we were so pleased to learn how these data support the National Weather Service in the U and how this project aligns very well with objectives for learning about weather in 5th grade and other elementary grades. The Lost Ladybug CS project has connections to students learning about ecosystems and life cycles. We are excited to learn more about teachers' connections with their classroom experiences.
Diane Jass Ketelhut
Thanks for your interesting video! You mention that you weren't in the classroom due to covid restrictions. Were teachers using your project with in-classroom students or were they attempting to do so virtually during an emergency remote instruction phase?
Sarah Carrier
Professor, Science Education
Diane, thank you for this comment! Our Teacher Advisory Group (TAG) teachers were mostly in the classroom with their students over this past year, though a couple of them had to switch to online due to quarantine requirements when a student tested positive. We have recently observed in one classroom and we were so impressed with how the teacher had established routines for both CS projects, and the students clearly knew just what to do! This summer we will train our broader group of teacher participants, with some TAG teachers' support sharing their strategies, and we look forward to observing and learning how this work can expand to many more classrooms.
Molly Phillips
This is so fantastic!!! Also Good to see you in this space Chris!
I am a member of the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections Education Sessional Committee and we are hosting a virtual Natural History Collection Education DemoCamp. The goal is to share, discover, and discuss educational materials that have a framework in natural history. This project would be a perfect fit so if you all have the bandwidth to participate please do! We really want to build more connections between museums, zoos and botanical gardens! Please see the website https://spnhc.org/education-democamp/ for more info, or please reach out with more questions!
We also have an Open Educational Resources Portal where you can post your finished materials to get them out there to a broader audience: https://qubeshub.org/community/groups/collections
Christine Goforth
Head, Citizen Science
Hi Molly! Thanks for watching our video and suggesting SPNHC’s resources for our work. We will gladly look into both opportunities! We won’t be ready to share our finalized supports until the end of our project, but will keep your portal in mind for when we’re ready to share.
Lara Gengarelly
Great video TL4CS team! Making connections between citizen science and science learning in an elementary classroom is a challenge for many teachers. The video highlights your iterative & collaborative design process and illustrates well how your educative products will support teachers. I look forward to sharing your video with my colleagues at UNH.
Sarah Carrier
Professor, Science Education
Lara, thanks so much for your comments and recognition of the challenges teachers face and the need to support them in bringing rich citizen science in their elementary classrooms. Thank you for sharing with your colleagues!!