The article summarizes the challenges and goals for citizen science projects and participatory action research emphasizing the need to balance interests among participants, students, educators, and scientists. With these diverse interests comes a flurry of challenges for citizen science including balancing science and education, ensuring data quality, forming partnerships to enhance educational goals, evaluating impacts, and building institutional support for such activities (p180).
Longer Summary
The article focuses on two case studies one of which is on the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s (CLO) successful citizen science projects, as well as Cornell’s Garden Mosaics project.
CLO offers many citizen science projects including Project FeederWatch, Classroom Feeder Watch, The Birdhouse Network, etc. Many of these programs work because of the balance of goals. First, looking at research goals, scientists realized they could collect data through a count protocol that proved to be statistically and scientifically successful (p179). While in the process of collecting data, participants began to raise interesting questions regarding bird habitats, migration patterns, etc. With this response, scientists realized that there needed to be more attention paid to the educational aspects of the project. This is when CLO partnered with their education division to devise “research kits” that explained the process of collecting the data as well as potential findings (p179). This partnership between scientists and educators allowed the participants to not only contribute to a scientific research project, but to also gain an education or learning experience as well.
All projects, no matter how successful, come with challenges. Here we will summarize the challenges and their respective descriptions.
Balancing science and education – “Engaging lay people in real research raises questions about what kinds of scientific questions are appropriate for various audiences and how the research promotes educational goals” (p180). Citizen science coordinators need to be open to changing research or educational components to meet the needs of all participants.
Ensuring data quality – There are three main issues under this challenge, data collection protocol, data editing and analysis, and observer training. First, the protocol developed for CLO’s bird counting considered people’s weekly schedule allowing more people to participate while still being scientifically sound. Second, to ensure accurate data editing and analysis, participants are prompted by “friendly messages” to double-check their entries if the computer has determined that a data point doesn’t make sense. Additionally, scientists double check and “clean” the data after entry. Lastly, CLO offers training opportunities for all participants.
Forming partnerships to enhance educational goals – “The key to successfully adapting and disseminating projects has been to work closely with educators to develop materials that they can meld into their own programs” (p182).
Evaluating impacts – Citizen Science projects should partner with education or communication departments that can help conduct project evaluations or surveys. These surveys can evaluate what the participants have learned or taken away from the study.
Building institutional support for Citizen Science – It is important for citizen science projects to have the commitment and resources they need. This means support from their parent organization in terms of employees and financial resources. Additionally, many projects apply for outside grants.
After reviewing these challenges, the section concludes with three reasons for why citizen science projects should exist. First, they comment that both the researchers and participants benefit from the project. Second, these projects create a culture where there is support for both educational and scientific goals. Lastly, when done properly, there is a nice division of labor between educators and scientists. This fair division allows programs like CLO to run smoothly.
The second case study, Garden Mosaics, has similar goals, but is more focused on learning science content, having students participate in an environmental action project, as well as form partnerships with their elders (p185). For the first point of learning science content, organizers realized that they needed to provide more guidance compared to that of citizen science projects. Second, once the science learning occurs, students are required to take that new knowledge and create an action project. This project emphasizes not only learning, or “taking away” local knowledge, but also giving back to that local community. This is also where students begin to form relationships with their elders.
The article ends with the recognition that Citizen Science projects do not directly influence behavior. They state, “Citizen Science does not directly address some of the behavioral goals of environmental education, particularly those that focus on changing personal behavior. Rather Citizen Science defines behavior change in terms of critical thinking, and it is hoped that through engaging in such thinking during their research, participants will be better able to analyze information about the environmental issues and to make sound decisions about the environment” (p192).
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